Nurse workforce planning is good medicine for quality care

Healthcare organizations and patients thrive when the right caregivers with the right skills are in the right places. For one large hospital system serving nearly a million people at more than 400 sites, providing nurse and midwife care requires detailed staffing, skills development, and hiring plans for each site coupled with an aggregated view of the whole organization.

More than 400 nurse managers contribute to the healthcare system’s workforce plan each year. The process takes about 10% of their time from November to April, meaning that about 38,000 person-hours annually are diverted from patient care. Once nurse managers gather and enter their workforce data, a central planning team builds a consolidated view for approval by the senior nursing and midwifery officer and CFO.

The organization needed a way to provide a real-time, consolidated view of nursing and midwifery staffing that aligned with top-down budgets. They wanted to eliminate spreadsheets, reduce forecasting and reporting errors, and shorten the workforce planning process. The organization used Anaplan in its finance department, and they recommended the platform to the workforce planning team because of its flexibility, data security and governance, and cost-effectiveness.

Better processes with organization-wide views

The organization’s workforce planning solution on the Anaplan platform has been enthusiastically adopted. “The staff had used spreadsheets for a long time, and if we had made the new process more complicated, we would’ve gotten a lot of pushback,” says a technology manager at the organization. “The key was to make it nice and easy to use, which we were able to do with Anaplan.”

With Anaplan, the organization can now:

• Aggregate nurse and midwife staffing data from hundreds of sites consistently, in one place. Nurse managers enter staff data directly in the system instead of their own individual spreadsheets.
• Provide standard, organization-wide views of staffing data to support leaders’ decision-making and improve efficiency.
• Reduce risk and improve care by ensuring that staffing plans meet regulatory requirements.
• Improve recruiting through precise staff forecasting. For example, the organization can foresee increased need for specific nursing grades or specialties at a specific site and dial up targeted recruiting.
• Generate time-off recommendations for nurses. This supports the health and well-being of nursing staff, and also helps the organization reduce the financial burden of accumulated leave.

And importantly, the Anaplan solution frees up nurse managers’ time to care for their patients and their staffs. “We’re better able to provide patient-centered care for hundreds of thousands of people thanks to Anaplan,” the technology manager says. 

More focus on positive outcomes

The organization is starting to use the nurse and midwife workforce plan in Anaplan to align skills and headcount with weekly patient occupancy levels. This promises to reduce the need for last-minute contract staff, which will keep costs in check while maintaining mandated nurse-to-patient ratios. The organization also intends to integrate statistical demand forecasting and machine learning into staffing processes to build seasonality into their workforce plans.

These improvements, underpinned by Anaplan, will further enable everyone at the organization — most importantly, the hardworking nurses and midwives on the front lines, and the nurse managers who support them — to focus their energies on patient care and positive outcomes.