San Antonio-based University Health System (UHS) was facing a crisis: The registered nurse (RN) vacancy rate had shot up to 22 percent— threatening patient-care quality and requiring the UHS Emergency Center to close its doors to some trauma events. In addition, the lack of community resources was hurting both employees and patients. Linda Boyer-Owens, vice president of people and organizational development, knew that action needed to be taken.
To help address these challenges, Boyer-Owens and her staff developed the Innovation Partnerships for Workforce Learning and Enhancement initiative. “(The health care professional shortage) hit the health system in 2001, and it is predicted to become even more serious over the next five to 10 years as the baby boomers begin to retire and as we begin to all need more health care because we’re aging,” Boyer-Owens said. “We could feel the impact starting, and we really wanted to position ourselves so that we could continue to grow.”
To make the initiative successful, partnerships needed to be developed and utilized to their fullest potential. Boyer-Owens and her staff constructed programs like the UHS foundation nursing scholarship, nursing school extension campuses, nursing license reinstatement programs, health care career advisers, a nurse exchange program with Mexico and a local health care consortium. The nursing exchange program with Mexico proved to be a mutually beneficial experience. “They have an interest in learning more about health care in the United States. We have an interest, of course, being so close to the border, really about the cultures and health care that goes on in Mexico so that we can better serve patients who are often here in San Antonio. It was very, very interesting—especially to the staff who work in places like our emergency room, to be able to really see and connect with patients who would be coming from other parts of the world,” Boyer-Owens explained.
“The biggest challenge for all of us in health care is that there is a shortage of faculty, so when we wanted to partner with the schools to find ways to open their doors, it was difficult for them to find a way to make that happen. We had to start innovating ways to get them more faculty, and we found that we had resources internally. We actually had qualified faculty on our staff. That was one of the big barriers that we had to clear. It wasn’t so much a matter of money—it was a matter of actually having the skilled and credentialed people.”
Other aspects of the program were successful as well. The nurse re-entry program brought 53 nurses back to the community, and seven of those back to University Health System.
What is likely the most significant success of the Innovation Partnerships for Workforce Learning and Enhancement initiative is the decrease of the RN shortage. “We were able to bring the RN shortage down to 2 or 3 percent over the course of two years,” Boyer-Owens said. “One of the best lessons we learned in all of this was that involving our workforce in teaching the next generation is very rewarding. They’re engaged now, working on cultural competence and interpreter skills for health-care professionals, kind of advancing the state of their practice. And they like that—they like being able to offer that to the younger professionals coming on board: perpetuating progress.”
She concluded, “I have a very innovative staff. We do like to find new ways to solve new and old problems. That’s part of our life and we enjoy it.”
