Virtual Nursing’s Future: Why Listening to Nurses is Key to Success
By 2025, it’s predicted that 50% of hospitals will have some level of virtual nursing integrated into their operations. However, despite this growth, many hospitals are struggling to scale virtual nursing programs effectively. Part of the challenge lies in the fact that different institutions have varying ideas of what virtual nursing actually is. What it’s not is a program designed to take away the critical decisions nurses make at the bedside. Instead, virtual nursing is meant to act as an additional layer of safety and support—another set of ‘hands’ to help manage care.
Virtual nursing can handle tasks such as patient admissions, discharges, and education, relieving bedside nurses of administrative duties and allowing them to focus on critical thinking and patient care. It can also serve as a mentorship tool, helping to guide novice nurses and creating a sense of safety and support.
So why are hospitals having trouble scaling this innovative approach? In many cases, it’s because we’ve tried to adopt it too quickly, without enough planning or input from the nurses themselves. To truly make virtual nursing work, hospitals need to take a step back and focus on gradual implementation. Instead of rolling it out hospital-wide, start by piloting it in a single department or unit.
Most importantly, listen to the nurses who are using it. Let them describe how virtual nursing has made their jobs easier or improved patient outcomes. By leveraging their insights and real-world examples, hospitals can create a platform for lasting change that improves care while supporting the essential role of nurses.
Listen to Holly Lorenz, Narinder Singh, and Tiffany Wyatt explore the future of virtual nursing in the hospital.
Video Transcript
Narinder Singh:
Great. Well, let me talk about virtual nursing because that’s a little bit the topic of the day for us is that on one hand it’s a cachet right now, and I think part of it was after Covid travel nursing went up, so there was a budgetary reason and then there were such a shortage of nurses. People were like, we got to invest in nursing. So virtual nursing became the term of the day, and we’ve seen things where about half of hospitals say by 2025, they’re going to have some level of this in their hospital at the same time. One thing that’s interesting is that we’re seeing half of the hospitals that have deployed virtual nursing are saying they’re having trouble scaling it right now. And so maybe if you’re kind of projecting your crystal ball or looking in through, what do you think is happening that these two factors are occurring at the same time?
Holly Lorenz:
Well, I think first of all, everyone initially has had their own idea of what virtual means. And virtual nursing is not a program or initiative to take away the decisions the nurses making at the bedside. It is really meant to be one as a safety check, two as a way to add a second set of hands, although they are virtual hands and three people within the hospitals who are deploying and implementing this really need to start with what’s in it for the nurse or for the healthcare provider that’s going to want to make them really look into virtual nursing and lean into that as something that can help them. And honestly, probably the two breakthroughs other than virtual sitting have been really looking at what’s workload that you can pull away from me at the bedside that would really make my day easier. And when you think of admission admissions for patients and you also think of discharging patients and patient education, that’s something that people can really get their eyes and hands around and realize if there is a virtual nurse doing that work.
I as that bedside caregiver have many other things that I can refocus on that needs someone there in the room to observe and watch and really do some critical thinking and thinking on their feet with the use of someone in the background. We’ve also seen it in some instances of being such a wonderful mentor. It’s like having a preceptor by your side at all times and it’s not there to say, I caught you. It’s there to say, I’m here to help you as that second set of hands, a way of feeling safe in the environment that you thought might’ve been unmanageable without virtual nursing,
Narinder Singh:
What do you think then is causing, I mean if you had to guess, why do you think people are having trouble scaling it then?
Holly Lorenz:
Well, I think that we tried to adopt it in too much of a mass go live, get a unit, pick an apartment, pick an area where you’ve got the perfect setting of where to deploy this and people can see it’s really working. And then allow the nurses that are involved in it from whether that’s the virtual nurse or the hands-on nurse to describe what they’ve done to make their work day, their ability to leave work and feel like they’ve done a good job that day. And if we use those examples and really allow that to be the platform for change, we will be able to get somewhere I think more quickly than a deployment or deployment. A deployment. Remind
Narinder Singh:
Me of something, the CEO of Salesforce, mark Benioff used to say to me, which is less changes in a year than you think and more changes in a decade than you can imagine and it feels like you’re describing that kind of piece.