Nurse Turnover Case Study

In the future, the issue of turnover is and will continue to be a problem for the NICU and ACH as a whole. Many new graduates are joining the NICU in pursuance of experience, subsequently, returning to school to advance their degree or take a travel nursing assignment. This is a major cost to the ICUs, due to the amount of time orientation for a new nurse requires. Simultaneously, these nurses also receive their Neonatal Resuscitation Program and Pediatric Advanced Life Support certifications, another useless expense. Consequently, this turnover creates nurses being pulled from other ICUs, Intermediate units, and Resource Nurses into the NICU. For most hospitals, this is not an issue, but ACH does not retain consistent policies and procedures
for every unit. Each unit has a specific policy for the same procedure. This increases the risk of mistakes, which is extremely costly in the neonatal population. The considerable obstacle for all hospitals will continue to be staffing and retention. ACH has begun to increase the patient loads for nurses to offset the staffing challenges.
Furthermore, infections will continue to be a rising complication. As insurances develop stricter reimbursement policies, central venous catheter and ventilator infections will emerge as a leading dilemma for hospitals. In the NICU at ACH the neonates are in PODs, which are open areas containing up to eight neonates, which has caused an increased risk of infection to some of the neonates. At some point this issue will have to be better addressed due to the infection potential.
Leadership and management complications in the NICUs future will continue to be challenges with staffing, mistakes, and infection control. These challenges are intensely important to the hospital due to the escalating expenses they impose.