Any experience could be valuable for my teaching hospital. The project I'm involved in has the aim to keep frontline nurses, especially late cereer nurses, longer in nursing care.
Hello, I do not have that information, but I would suggest that comes into contact with a great Brazilian researcher at the area of gerontology. Dr. Sueli Marques.; email: [email protected]
good luck
Nursing management and aging are two areas of my speech may be clearer in partnership to?
Good morning. We have this issue in the US as well. One practice I remember is to be mindful of the length of shifts for "veteran" nurses. Twelve-hour shifts may be too long and lead to increases in errors (for all nurses) especially with veteran nurses. If the organization can use some flexibility to accommodate veteran nurses' needs, such as being able to care for older family members, that can help the veteran nurse to continue to work and keep up with other responsibilities.
Second, keep your veteran nurses updated on current best practices, particularly if the nurse has been out of the workplace for some time. I've been a nurse for over 35 years, and many practices, such as wound care, have changed radically since when I graduated many years ago. I know I'd need to learn a lot if I were to rejoin the clinical nurse workforce.
Use the experience of the veteran nurses - they have nursing experience and life experience that help the veteran nurse to often have a better bedside manner and ability to keep calm. Veteran nurses can model caring behaviors that young nurses haven't mastered, because veteran nurses often can set priorities to see that their time is spent on the patient that needs them the most.
Nursing is a profession wherupon each nurse is accountable for their practice. This means that there are opprtunities for regular training, supervision, and appraisal processes in place each year to ensure evidence based practice.
The very exoerienced nurse, may not be able to handle the physical requirements of the bedside nurse. There are alternatives to continue and be of great worth. Teaching in a university, nursing informatics, wound care, working in outpatient care units, radiology outplatient and interventions. Nurse educator and nurse researcher are options if you have your MSN or better. Other roles are Performance Improvement and assisting an institution with their Magnet applications.
Many experienced veteren nurses are put on carical work as they have problems in eyesight and phydical . They can be very good as refrencing for patient bedside nursing care for their past experiences . No doubt they still can function in clinical areas but not in critical area to avoid errorr. They can be located as clinical nurse to keep thdm update
Thank you all for your answers so far. Very valuable.
If anybody wants to suggest a paper (in english) about the topic, is welcome.
I have a few papers in English to get you started:
Myer, S. & Amendolair, D. (2014). Time is of the essence: Retain your older nurses. NursingManagement, 45(5), 12-6.
Clendon, J. & Walker, L. (2013). Nurses age over 50 years and their experience of shift work. Journal ofNursing Management, 21, 903-13.
Letvak, S., Ruhm, C. & Gupta, S. (2013). Difference in health, productivity, and quality of care in younger and older nurses. Journal of Nursing Management, 21, 914-21.
Check the bibliographies as well for more potential helpful literature.
We have to think different. When ju as young nurse enter the unit, you often ask for jobb within acute care, you are open minded for everything , but you don´t want to work at units where older people are caring for. Efter an acute carrier you my be ready for other kind of nursing. You don´t want lot of stress, you want to have time for your patientens, and you have developed skill for listening, communication, you see the mening of to be with the patient without doing so match. My point is nursers with lot of experience, and lot of skills to take responsibility for people not in need of acute care, for them we have to find new areas to jobb within
Many nurses have found new mening by move over to elective care and specially to care of older people.
I know of a hospital that has the veteran nurse just do admissions. She/he does not take responsibility for the care for the patients after they are admitted. The patient is assigned to another nurse. This can be helpful for times when there is a pattern of a heavy volume of admissions.
i think its important to recognise the age and stage of nurses and where they are at, and what they want to do. In terms of change processes there can be an issue for nurses at the end of their career, which needs to be senistively managed, perhaps acknowledging that major change is not where their thinking or motivation is at, but suporting them to 'not get in the way' of change projects.