Improving Nurse Retention & Healthcare Outcomes: Innovating with the Impact Model

Awarded third place in the 2021 AJN Book of the Year Awards in Professional Issues!

Empowering, engaging, and retaining qualified nurses are critical healthcare priorities. Why? Nurse retention is directly correlated to healthcare outcomes, and nurse turnover has a negative, multidimensional effect on healthcare organizations.

Turnover affects job satisfaction among clinical nurses, which leads to burnout, making it harder for them to provide safe patient care and achieve overall organizational initiatives. Further, the high costs associated with nurse turnover can have a huge impact on a hospital's or health system's profit margin.

Improving Nurse Retention & Healthcare Outcomes will help clinical nurses understand how to elevate their practice as frontline care providers and give executives a new, strategic approach to nurse retention. Authors Judy Thomas and Mellisa Renter outline the IMPACT Program they created to stimulate empowerment and professional growth. In addition to explaining the program, how it works, and what it has achieved, this book provides an implementation path to make an immediate impact on nurse empowerment, engagement, and retention.

Chapter 1 outlines the retention practices commonly used by most organizations. As you'll see, these practices are often nothing more than short-term fixes. They only see you through the immediate crisis, are quite costly, and offer little return on investment in terms of overall strategic initiatives.

Chapter 2 discusses the key stakeholders and instrumental decision points in the creation of our program to improve nurse retention.

Chapter 3 takes a high-level look at the structure of the IMPACT Model.

Chapters 4-7 offer step-by-step details on each phase of the IMPACT Model.

Chapter 8 describes the type of leadership commitment it
takes to start and sustain a program of this magnitude.

Chapter 9 explains how we obtained leadership buyin from the get-go to begin the process of developing a program and achieved broader organizational buy-in to sustain it once it was off the ground.

Chapter 10 reveals outcomes from specific IMPACT Model projects completed by participating nurses as well as broader organizational gains associated with the IMPACT Model.

Chapter 11 showcases the professional journey of clinical nurses as they navigate the program. You will gain a greater perspective on how the IMPACT Model empowers clinical nurses, who spend the majority of their time on the front lines.

Appendix A: Includes our full Explanation of Activities forms.

Appendix B: Offers full-page forms discussed earlier in the book