Erlanger Health System has seen a significant decrease in nurses calling in sick since increasing pay by around 10% for Erlanger's roughly 1,500 hospital-based registered nurses and more than 300 on-call nurses effective Feb. 5.
Rachel Harris, chief nursing executive, said during an Erlanger Board of Trustees meeting Thursday that the call-in reduction was an unanticipated benefit of the raises, which trustees approved during a January board meeting as part of an effort to help recruit and retain more nurses.
Throughout the pandemic, many hospitals contracted with high-cost travel nurses to mitigate workforce shortages. Erlanger, on the other hand, made the decision to forgo that staffing model and instead offer incentives and overtime pay to current staff and use internal contracts.
Harris said during last month's board meeting that while hospital leaders stand by that strategy, relying on incentives and overtime pay was no longer sustainable, which is why the roughly 10% pay increase was needed.
(READ MORE: UTC's new accelerated nursing program aims to help nursing shortage)
At Thursday's meeting, Harris attributed the reduction in call-ins to decreasing the hospital's reliance on contracts that mandated staff work four or five shifts per week and incentives that were hard for nurses to refuse in favor of a permanent pay increase. Higher base pay has allowed nurses to make the same or more without having to pick up overtime hours, according to Harris.
"They would come, and they were tired, and so four or five shifts in, they would call in. They're exhausted," she said. "I think it's giving them a chance to build back their resilience. And I think we're getting more quality care out of the staff, because you just can't continuously for 2 1/2 to three years work this amount of hours.
"They've done it, and they've done a fantastic job, but I think it's given them a chance to take a breath," Harris said.
Harris said in an emailed statement that Erlanger's nurse retention rate has also improved as the health system has added focus on mental well-being, allowing staff to achieve better work-life balance.
While burnout in nursing is not new, the pandemic in many ways exacerbated the issue. Understaffing meant individual nurses were having to take on more and more patients, who were as a whole sicker and more hostile toward medical professionals than in the pre-pandemic era.
In an annual survey from the American Nurses Foundation conducted in November, 84% of the nearly 12,600 nurses surveyed reported feeling stressed or dealing with burnout. Of the nurses surveyed, 19% said they intend to leave their position in the next six months, and 27% are considering leaving.
Surveyed nurses reported that the leading contributors to burnout were not enough staff to adequately do their job (38%) followed by lack of respect from their employer (14%), too many administrative tasks (10%) and low compensation (9%).
Jessica Holladay, nurse director of trauma and surgical critical care at Erlanger, said in an emailed statement that the recent pay increase is meant to help or prevent those feelings of burnout and increase job satisfaction.
"We are setting up our nurses to have the ability to be clinical nurses for long, healthy careers," Holladay said, "instead of getting burned out quickly and leaving the nursing profession."
Contact Elizabeth Fite at efite@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6673.