The Critical Role of Nurses in Shaping the Future of Healthcare
Hospitals today are grappling with challenges that, while not new, are becoming harder to ignore. Many of these issues—like staff shortages, rising patient acuity, and hospital complications—have long existed, but we’re finally more comfortable talking about them. In particular, the voices of nurses are growing louder as they push for change and advocate for solutions like integrating technology that enhances, rather than diminishes, the humanity of healthcare. Yet, without truly listening to nurses—those on the frontlines of patient care—efforts to address challenges such as mentoring novice staff, managing the high cost of patient sitters, and curbing turnover will fall short. The future of healthcare demands a fresh approach, and nurses must be at the heart of it.
Listen to Holly Lorenz, Narinder Singh, and Tiffany Wyatt explore the challenges of nursing.
Video Transcript
Narinder Singh:
I want to start, Holly with something actually related to some of your PhD research is the challenges of nursing today, especially with burnout, we’ve got massive shortages. We have huge number of nurses leaving the profession really early in the career and overwhelming post covid a sense of burnout. And then they’re facing huge retirements. They’re facing seniors that are growing. And so we’re having more and more acute patients. So this is the situation of nursing and then we see the equal challenges inside of hospitals. Tiffany, maybe you want to cover what we are seeing when we talk to hospitals?
Tiffany Wyatt:
Yeah. Well here are the challenges we hear when we do talk to hospitals and it’s often the short staff, the staffing shortages both in nursing and CNAs and every area really. And then a lot of the higher acuity of patients. We are hearing that time and time again and that the nurses are having to take care of sicker patients with the same type of resources. And Holly, how much of this have you been through in your time last 40 plus years in the profession? And how much do you see of this as new? And how much of this do we just have transparency on? The problem that we have always had?
Holly Lorenz:
Well, honestly, there’s been evolutions of every one of these challenges that I’ve had exposure to staff shortages aren’t new, it’s just that we’re much more comfortable talking about them and really allowing the voices of the nurses to help us manage each of these situations here, the one new thing that has really just started to evolve over the last 18 months, two years and become very prominent and one that’s strategically important to organizations is that opportunity for how we as leaders or people even in the IT industry can help with nurses feeling safe at work, what we can do from a violence prevention or violence awareness that can really change the work environment for nurses. I’m going to tell you when you think of staff shortages, nurses have always looked at this as I need to feel that my workload is manageable every day, whatever I’m doing.
So there’s different ways to manage that and technology has been primary for that in the last more than a decade. And what we as people who are looking at how to solve this or even address this, really need to link every strategy that we’re doing for what challenge we’re really addressing with that because I think people and anyone in healthcare sometimes really just needs to be able to connect what’s actually happening from a strategic standpoint into what they need from a work-life balance in managing the challenges that you’ve really done a nice job of highlighting.
Narinder Singh:
Do you think that in your career, let’s focus on when you were a nursing leader. Do you think the voice of nurses in technology decisions for the hospital is the same? Has it increased? I think it clearly increased after covid because of the travel nursing surges, but go to pre covid, do you feel like it was a gradual increase or do you feel like it was still outside looking in to push for technology change that actually helped nurses?
Holly Lorenz:
Well, I think nurses have always been an integral part of that. And when I think of when most people were building electronic health records, it was all about let’s not force the eRecord to fall into how we do this in current workflow. But there was a lot of study that went in and really self-awareness of what the workflow was and how technology could really advance that. So I think that without listening to the nurse, you’re going to be so much further in anything that you use to adopt, whether it’s with technology or even processes. So I think that’s always been a part. I think some people are just more attuned to listening to that.