National Nurses Week this year is May 6-12, 2023. This is a wonderful opportunity to celebrate your valuable nursing teams for their tireless efforts and the difference they make in the lives of patients, all year long.
One way to say “thank you” to your nursing team is to improve their day-to-day experience within your facility. We’ve got some ideas to make that a reality.
Let’s get started:
- The reality of the nursing experience today
- 3 barriers to a better nursing experience
- How to improve the nursing experience
- The benefits of improved communications on your nursing team
The reality of the nursing experience today
In order to say “thank you” in a truly meaningful way, it helps to understand a typical “day in the life” of your nursing team.
Spoiler alert: there is no typical “day in the life” when you’re a nurse! Every day is completely different, depending on a whole host of factors:
- Coordinating with doctors: Are they new to the facility, or old pros? Are they green or highly experienced? Are they open to suggestions from nurses? How’s their bedside manner? How do they communicate with the nursing team?
- Collaborating with other nurses on the floor: What’s their nursing style? How do they communicate with their fellow nurses? How long have they been on the clock?
- Prioritizing patients: How many will there be in this shift? What injuries and illnesses are they coming in with? Who will need medications and when? How many emergency situations will there be? How demanding of a nurse’s time are the patients or their families?
- Juggling paperwork: How many charts will need updates for the next shift? What other red tape will have to be completed before clocking out?
- Finding downtime to recharge: Will they get any at all? Will they have a chance to eat something, grab some water…even go to the bathroom?
3 barriers to a better nursing experience
The life of a nurse is unpredictable day-to-day. So how can you make an impact on their experience? It starts with eliminating some common points of friction nurses experience every day.
1. Staffing shortages
When healthcare facilities are understaffed, it’s often nurses who pick up the slack. This can lead to a lot of frustration and a general breakdown in good communication.
2. High patient expectations
Everyone wants the best care for themselves or their love ones. With customer experience at an all-time priority in healthcare and other industries, there’s never been more pressure to get it right, every time.
3. Nurse burnout
#1 and #2 on this list tend to lead to serious burnout: tired, frustrated nurses who withdraw from their job, don’t communicate, and let important things slip through the cracks. It can also lead to high turnover in your facility, which can be a huge expense in the long run.
Improve the nursing experience with intelligent, connected experiences
Communication breakdowns are one of the biggest problems for nurses within a care facility. Without strong, effective communication, important information is lost and patient care can suffer.
That’s where intelligent, connected experiences come in. It’s about more than proactive communication; it’s about unifying your team and empowering them to do their best work.
Intelligent, AI-powered patient interactions
Artificial intelligence (AI) is all the rage in healthcare, and for good reason. With staffing shortages and patients with high demands, it can be helpful to automate processes and free up your nursing team to focus on the most urgent care issues.
RingCentral for Healthcare leverages this exciting new tech to help you deliver the ideal patient experience, every time:
- Intelligent customer routing ensures patients connect with the right staff, the first time
- Automated SMS reminders help patients manage their schedules and attend important appointments
- Chatbots can help patients complete routine tasks without taking up the time of your team
- Our contact center AI measures patient sentiment during customer service interactions to ensure an optimal experience
- Our secure telehealth video chats come with advanced insights like meeting transcripts, highlights by topic, and more to help with note-taking and charting
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Connect and unify your team for stronger collaboration
Silos on a care team slow down every aspect of nursing, and these inefficiencies can impact both patient experience and overall revenue as well as employee satisfaction.
RingCentral for Healthcare is an all-in-one platform built to bust silos in any care facility. Here are some of the features that can improve the daily experience for nurses:
- Bring desk and frontline staff together with hands-free, push-to-talk technology
- Team messaging for one-on-one conversations, team chats, file sharing, and more
- Secure video conferencing with deep insights for telehealth appointments or staff meetings
- Powerful integrations with popular apps for more streamlined workflows
- Contact center capabilities break down silos between internal and external channels to better track information and patient journeys
- Allow nurses to connect securely and protecting their personal identity, number, and caller ID via BYOD devices
Delight patients with adaptive experiences
Just like no two days are the same when you’re a nurse, no two patients need the same kind of care and follow-up. But one thing is for sure: the best patient experiences happen when folks feel known and cared for by their care team.
RingCentral for Healthcare helps teams deliver personalized care experiences with powerful customer service features:
- Virtual care support: Care teams can make house calls from anywhere with secure video conferencing, messaging, and more.
- Easy appointment scheduling: Patients can set up new appointments via web-based chat in your patient portal
- Personalized communication: Assign dedicated care navigators to stay in touch with patients however they prefer to communicate: phone calls, SMS, web chat, even video check-ins.
With more intelligent, connected experiences, nurses can be more efficient and more effective. That means: faster interventions, shorter patient stays, more patient days per year, and higher patient revenue for your facility.
RingCentral for Healthcare: The Rx for a better nursing experience
One major way to say “thank you” to the nurses in your facility is to improve their day-to-day experience on the floor. RingCentral for Healthcare can help by making it easier than ever for care teams to collaborate with each other and deliver exceptional care.
To see how RingCentral can transform your care team’s communications, take a tour of all our features.
Originally published May 10, 2023