Nurse satisfaction or engagement data aggregated at the organization or unit level outperform the mean, median, or other benchmark statistic of the national database used. Include participation rates, analysis, and evaluation of the data.
Nurse engagement is measured annually during the Employee Engagement Survey process. In 2014 we used the Morehead Associates Employee survey tool (recently acquired by Press Ganey Associates) to measure registered nurse satisfaction. This survey is used throughout our institution and action planning based on the annual results is completed at both the organizational and unit level.
Morehead Associates has worked with healthcare organization to provide survey and post-survey consulting since 1979. The transition to Press Ganey builds on this expertise.The Morehead Associates Employee survey gives clinical nurses the opportunity to express their opinions in a confidential manner. The results of the survey are shared at the organizational and unit level allowing leaders to build on strengths and identify opportunities to improve the workplace. Action plans are generated by eliciting feedback from associates. The input of the nursing team is pivotal to the identification of the areas to improve and the resulting action plans.
There are 58 questions on the core survey, designed to measure four domains of engagement (see Exhibit EP3EO.2).
The Commitment Indicators (which Morehead Associates uses interchangeably with the term "engagement") consists of six items. It captures the extent to which employees are: proud to work with, are willing to recommend as a place for care/work, desire to remain employed with, and overall satisfied with an organization.
The Manager Domain consists of thirteen questions and captures employee perceptions of their relationships with their direct managers.
The Employee Domain consists of twelve questions and captures the employee perceptions on their work/coworker relationship.
The Organizational Domain consists of twenty seven questions and captures employee perceptions about the organization, including topics such as confidence in leadership, overall quality provided by the organization, culture and other organizational issues.
All items are scored on a likert scale from one to five, one being the lowest score and five the highest. Results are compared to Morehead's National benchmark.
In 2014, our participation rate was 68%.
Tools used to support the action planning differ based on the question type and are presented below (Exhibit EP3EO.1a, b,c).
Exhibit EP3EO.1
Exhibit EP3EO.1a Start-Stop-Continue Exercise for Employee Domain Items.pdf
Exhibit EP3EO.1b Start-Stop-Continue Exercise for Manager Domain Items.pdf
Exhibit EP3EO.1c Visioning Exercise.pdf
Exhibit EP3EO.2
Analysis
The data is submitted electronically and initial analysis is performed by Morehead (Press Ganey). This ensures that the data remains anonymous. Organizational level data for the department of nursing identifies that clinical nurses overall are satisfied employees.
The overall satisfaction at FF Thompson is climbing as evidenced by Exhibit EP3EO.3. This is contrary to the current National trend. As noted in OO1, FF Thompson has been through significant changes over the past three years, including an affiliation with the University of Rochester, a change in CEO and a financial turnaround. The success that the organization is now achieving and the more recent financial successes has brought a renewed sense of stability. The action plans from the satisfaction survey last year included improvements in pay and a strong desire to institute merit based raises. For the Department of Nursing this resulted in a significant market adjustment across the board. Merit based raises were instituted and those performing at the highest levels received the a greater increase. Both these items were welcomed by the clinical nurses.
Clinical Nurses at FF Thompson are committed to the organization and outperform the National mean significantly. This was not a surprising result as many nurses have long tenure and remain at FF Thompson regardless of the challenges they have had to face. In the past two years, our Director of Critical Care and Director of Peri-operative Services have both retired. The clinical nurses were involved in the interviews for the new Directors and the new leaders are continuing a tradition of empowerment and the nurses in these areas are continuing to thrive. FF Thompson is increasing its volume and has had a positive financial margin for the past two years. Our significant growth has fostered a strong sense of continued success and stability. This is not the case for many community hospitals. All of these changes and successes are the basis for the continued satisfaction of our registered nurses. Exhibit EP3EO.4 shows that the nurses are FF Thompson are helping to drive the overall satisfaction of the organization as a whole.
Exhibit EP3EO.3
Data/Evaluation
Clinical Nurse Survey Results
The graph demonstrates that registered nurse satisfaction outperforms the National Registered Nurse Morehead mean in all categories.