Inpatient Nursing Workforce Transformation

Good Samaritan Hospital Medical Center, a member of Catholic Health Services of Long Island (CHSLI), is a 537-bed (including 100 nursing home beds), verified Level II Adult and Pediatric Trauma Center and not-for-profit teaching hospital serving communities on the south shore of Long Island in West Islip, New York. Good Samaritan’s healthcare services extend across the continuum of care. Good Samaritan also is one of the largest providers of emergency services on Long Island, with more than 85,000 emergency visits per year, of which 25,000 (34 percent) become inpatient admissions, while maintaining over three hundred outpatient surgeries per week at this time. Services include obstetrics, diagnostic imaging for cancer screening/treatment, and gynecology and maternal/infant care. A specialty pediatric unit and pediatric critical-care services manage a pediatric emergency department.

To successfully execute the operational performance pillar of the CHSLI strategic plan, implementing the correct staffing model and optimized organizational infrastructure at Good Samaritan was imperative. By engaging nurse leaders in collaborative improvement efforts across the organization, a strategy was deployed that harnessed legacy strengths while supporting a more efficient care delivery model. The operational performance pillar of the strategic plan aimed to realize a $3 million workforce productivity improvement in inpatient nursing by more effectively aligning staffing to volume demand, redesigning charge nurse roles, providing leadership with tools to make informed staffing decisions, and analyzing potential unit consolidation to improve nursing staff utilization.

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