January 2005
 Hospital System’s Financial
Planning Service Going Strong for Nearly a Decade
The Washington County Hospital System (WCHS), which has
about 2,100 employees, launched a service in 1996 for employees enrolled in its
retirement program to get independent, professional financial advice. Before
the program began, employees would sign up for their retirement plans or make
changes to their financial portfolios without professional advice. Many blindly
made decisions about money they plan to use in their golden years based on a
hunch or with limited information.
Ensuring staff had access to independent, unbiased, and
objective investment advice became a priority for the hospital’s senior
management, said Brooks McBurney, vice president of Human Resources at WCHS.
WCHS hired a Hagerstown-based financial planner who comes into the hospital on
a particular day a month to meet with employees and review their portfolios.
Employees are also able to visit the financial planner outside of the hospital
if they aren’t able to make an appointment on the date the planner is in
the hospital. Employees get as much time with the financial planners as they
need – a luxury that hasn’t been abused, according to McBurney.
Employees pay $10 a year for the service and WCHS contributes $48,000--saving
employees the thousands of dollars that financial planners typically charge.
McBurney, who says the service is unique among Maryland
hospitals, was inspired to offer the financial consulting to employees after
the health care system converted its retirement plan – the 403(b) –
from a non-match plan to a match plan. The health care system matches an
employee’s contributions based on how much they are actually putting in
their 403(b). At least 1,300 hospital employees are enrolled in the 403(b),
which is made available to all full-time and part-time employees.
While the financial firms that manage 403(b) funds provide
client services as part of the program, hospital officials felt it would be
better for employees in the 403(b) to get independent financial counseling and
not be influenced by an organization’s hidden agenda such as financial
incentives from mutual funds, according to McBurney.
While the financial planning service is geared to the
system’s 403(b) program, employees have the option of talking to a
financial planner about their entire financial future, including education
savings for dependents. “The financial planner takes into consideration
what other types of investments employees might have,” McBurney said
Laurie Bender, internal auditor for the health system,
recently took advantage of the service to discuss her entire financial outlook
with the planner.
“It was getting close to the end of the year and I
started to worry about my investments,” said Bender, mother of four
children. “It had been a while since I tweaked them.”
Bender says she’s met with the planner several times in
the eight years the service has been available.
She likes the convenience of the service with its
availability at her work site and the ability to fit it into her busy
lifestyle. And since she’s met with the financial planner on a regular
basis, he is familiar with her portfolio
“Now I’m so used to having this service, I
can’t imagine not having it or having to pay for it without the help of my
employer,” she said. “It’s a valuable and useful benefit.”
Contact:
Brooks McBurney
Washington County
Health System
mcbrooks@wchsys.org
301-790-8505 (Back to the top)
 GBMC Employs Successful Recruitment
and Retention Pilot Program
Like most hospital officials responsible for recruiting,
Susan Coe, director of human resources at Greater Baltimore Medical Center
(GBMC) couldn’t figure out why the hospital was struggling with luring
nurses to the Towson-based hospital and keeping them there. With a team of
hospital officials, Coe designed “Teamwork is Rewarding,” a program
that uses existing nurses to help retain new recruits. The program also
provides an intense six-month training academy for new recruits to help get
them adjusted and prepared for the job. “Teamwork is Rewarding” is
designed to stabilize and reduce turnover through the creation of a more stable
work environment.
“We came to the conclusion that we wanted to take the
approach of making it everybody’s responsibility to assimilate and orient
new hires and take the responsibility in a nurturing and welcoming way,”
said Coe.
Although GBMC had difficulty in retaining nurses in several
specialty areas, they had significant retention concerns with oncology nurses.
With this in mind, the hospital made a decision to pilot the program,
“Teamwork is Rewarding,” in the recruitment of oncology nurses. The
program was put in place for the first time in 2004 and is geared toward recent
nursing school graduates.
GBMC, which has 314 beds, had previously assigned one nurse
on a unit who would get a small bonus to help new recruits get acclimated to
the job. With “Teamwork is Rewarding,” every nurse is now responsible
for educating, demonstrating, and showing people how to do the job and acting
as a resource for newly-hired nurses.
With the new program, existing staff still receives bonuses
but they’re only awarded if the new recruits stay in the job for the
duration of their six-month training. They also must staff the unit efficiently
and have to be compliant with standards set by the Joint Commission on
Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations (JCAHO) as measured by mock surveys
and favorable satisfaction surveys of new recruits.
“It really does take a village to raise children or to
bring people in and assimilate them into an organization and we were willing to
allocate significant resources to this program,” Coe added.
All full-time and part-time employees can participate in the
program. Bonuses are based on how many hours the employee works. Coe said GBMC
has chosen to invest a significant amount of money in bonuses because it
offsets the amount of money the hospital spends in training and then losing a
single employee.
“It pays itself back in financial terms and it pays the
organization back in terms of patient satisfaction and employee
satisfaction,” she said.
In the first 90 days of the six-month training academy for
oncology nurses, participants get a reinforcement of basic medical surgical
skills and basic concepts in oncology. In the second 90 days, new staff members
work to refine their skills in the oncology setting in appropriate ways that
build on their strengths.
Through the training academy, GBMC was able to recruit two
nurses in March and two in July and all four are still with the hospital.
Coe says the hospital plans to extend the program to other
shortage areas including telemetry, and clinical areas such as radiology and
pharmacy.
Laurie Mead, vice president of oncology and womens’ and
professional services at GBMC, said she’s already seen a significant
difference in the oncology unit in the year since “Teamwork is
Rewarding” and academy training programs have been launched.
“The morale has gone up so much and is so
positive,” Mead said. “The program has rejuvenated our existing
nurses and brought us new nurses.”
Contact:
Susan Coe
Greater Baltimore Medical
Center
443-849-3752
scoe@gbmc.org (Back to the top)
 Campaign At Franklin Square Bolsters
Nurse Recruitment
For years, Franklin Square Hospital Center in Baltimore
employed nurse recruitment strategies that they felt produced average results.
So Ann Possidente, manager of nurse recruitment and retention in collaboration
with nursing management and staff took the hospital’s recruitment strategy
up a notch. After brainstorming with other hospital nurses, they decided to
launch a recruitment and retention program that involved all nurses in the
hospital. The idea sounds simple but it ended up with a recruitment rate of 72
new nurses in five months.
The recruitment campaign, started in December 2003, hung on
the notion that each of the 758 nurses in the hospital knows other nurses
outside of Franklin Square either through friendships, their communities, and
from nursing school. It involved getting nurses to think about friends and
family members they could recruit to the hospital.
The campaign also was designed around assigning leaders on
each nursing unit to serve as champions. The champions are nominated by their
colleagues on the unit to represent them. Champions are intricately involved in
shaping the recruitment campaign--from how to put together monthly in-house job
fairs to how to reward nurses that recruited a new hire. There are 20
recruitment champions hospital-wide who can easily be spotted in their purple
and green Embrace Nursing scrub jacket.
“We felt that we had our best recruiters within our own
organization,” Possidente said.
“The staff was totally involved with the entire
campaign and they got the opportunity to actively participate in decision
making about the campaign. We welcomed them to participate in career fairs, to
define marketing strategies, ways to recognize current staff and any ideas that
they had related to getting more involved from a staff perspective,”
“The group of champions drive the campaign,” Possidente added.
The effort also involved an in-house branding campaign to
get nurses involved and excited about the hospital’s new recruiting
efforts. Each unit developed a slogan centered around the letter “P”
and the word “embrace.” For example, the oncology unit’s slogan
was “Embrace the Passion,” because of their involvement with their
patients.
Mary Bylen, a registered nurse at the ambulatory surgery
center who has worked at Franklin Square for 24 years, said nurses were excited
about the campaign and were motivated to help recruit additional nurses.
“Everyone who works here is proud of the
organization,” said Bylen, who also serves as co-chairman for the
recruitment and retention committee at the hospital. “Knowing the severity
of the shortage, they wanted to help hire nurses.”
The campaign is now focused on retention and the champions
have transitioned into a permanent committee that works on ways to keep nurses
on staff. According to Possidente, a recent retention survey found that nurses
aren’t necessarily looking for only financial rewards, but more
recognition and more educational opportunities for internal growth.
One of the ways the hospital answered this request was to
hold a catered gala to celebrate the hiring of 72 nurses in five months and to
introduce the Stars Nurse Recognition Program. The program, started in January
2005, recognizes an outstanding nurse, who is nominated by other nurses in the
hospital, for her efforts as a role model to other nurses and their treatment
of patients. Whomever is picked by the hospital’s retention committee gets
a special scrub jacket, a luncheon with their unit and recognition by upper
management at their meetings.
The survey retention also revealed that nurses wanted the
hospital administration to look at staffing ratios. The hospital responded by
adding 36 new nursing positions.
Nurse retention has already improved at Franklin Square. For
the last five months, turnover has averaged at 5.6 percent and is running about
1.4 percent monthly. Prior to the launch of the campaign, the hospital’s
nurse turnover rate hovered between 13-15 percent.
Possidente said the campaign’s branding is still
focused on the word “Embrace” but it’s now being used with words
that begin with the letter “C,” such as caring, competency and
compassion. She expects to hire another 60-70 nurses in the next year. The
number may sound high but is a direct result of changes in nurse to patient
ratios and volumes exceeding budgets this year.
Possidente says the focus over the last year on recruitment
and retention has helped motivate the nursing staff toward pursuing certain
awards such as the Solucient 100 Top Hospitals National Benchmarks for Success,
which included Franklin Square in 2004. Possidente says the nursing staff is
also pursuing “Magnet” status, which recognizes national excellence
in nursing. They hope to earn the designation within the next three years.
Contact:
Ann Possidente
Franklin Square
Hospital
443-777-7119
Ann.possidente@medstar.net (Back to the top)
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