Stanford Health Care’s Tri-Valley Hospital is given an award by the Association of California Nurse Leaders (ACNL) for Leadership Excellence as a Group for operational improvements made during their implementation of PERFECTSHIFT
In April 2022, Stanford Health Care Tri-Valley kicked off a mission to revamp and improve their staffing model, creating cooperation between the nursing units and empowering unit managers to use real-time data to ensure quality patient care with optimum staffing based on true acuity and state mandates. The team, comprising Nursing Division leadership and the Director of Workforce Optimization, worked to build collaborative relationships between nursing units, unit managers/assistant managers and house supervisors and finance.
As Stanford Health Care Tri-Valley came out of the worst of the COVID pandemic, its Nursing Division found itself faced with staffing costs and a budget crunch and a need to rethink how they were running its business. Productivity forms provided data but not much usable information or guidance. The organization had recently centralized the staffing office and was adjusting to standardized scheduling. The opportunity to begin using a web-based application (PERFECTSHIFT) was presented and Nursing leadership decided to explore the tools. As they worked with the PERFECTSHIFT team to design tools for each unit, they were able to customize the tool to meet varying needs. The team was able to incorporate volume, acuity and staffing in a way that provided the charge nurse with feedback regarding their staffing plan compared to both their unit-based staffing grid and nursing hours required based on acuity. The data from this every 4-hour tool is published on the web and is available to both the leadership team and house supervisors to use in patient placement decisions.
THESE TOOLS HAVE RESULTED IN GREATER TRANSPARENCY BOTH WITHIN PATIENT CARE SERVICES AND WITH FINANCE AND HR
In addition to real-time management, the data on the “dashboard tool” is carried forward to a biweekly operating summary and a biweekly look back on other performance/quality indicators recorded on the tool. This data is compared to the data from finance on a biweekly basis. Their diligent use of the tools has also given them the opportunity to improve performance through the pay period by understanding how each unit is doing on a daily/weekly basis.
“It has been a pleasure working with the PERFECTSHIFT team. Everyone has been very supportive from initial implementation to post implementation: Easy to work with, reliable and dependable. The PERFECTSHIFT tool has been very helpful in our daily staffing. It allowed us to have the transparency, visibility of the daily departmental clinical operation needs and the ability to track productivity. We truly appreciate the support!”
– MARIVIC PAZ, MBA, RN, NEA-BC, ACM CARITAS NURSE®
Director of Nursing- Medical Surgical, UM, Case Management, Social Services Care Transition, Dialysis, Interpreting Service
Collectively, these tools have resulted in greater transparency both within patient care services and with finance and HR. The ability to track the outcome of work process changes has been improved because the outcomes can be tracked on the dashboard and trended on web-based tools. Coaching for charge nurses is now able to be targeted based on the needs of each charge nurse. The relationship with house supervisors has significantly improved and role clarity has yielded an increased cohesion among directors, managers, charge nurses and house supervisors.
Tri-Valley Hospital’s poster presentation at the ACNL 2023 annual conference
Tri-Valley’s leadership team has not only been recognized for these achievements, they have experienced significant labor cost improvement, as the benefit chart demonstrates below.
Congratulations to Stanford Health Care Tri-Valley Hospital and their leaders for this accomplishment!
