Staffing: Tap Into the Experience of Legacy Nurses

New or reimagined roles are needed to combat the staffing crisis.

Countless articles have been written about the staffing crisis facing healthcare facilities. These pieces often focus on the dangers of the nursing shortage in America’s most trusted profession.

While sounding the alarm over the future of nursing is certainly warranted, there’s another aspect of the staffing crisis that doesn’t get the attention it deserves: the transfer of skills and knowledge between the nurses leaving the field and those who will be asked to take their places. According to a study by the American Association of Colleges of Nursing (AACN), 4.6 million nurses will retire by 2030, taking with them an immeasurable amount of experience and knowledge about what it takes to succeed.

Legacy nurses can play a vital role in combatting the staffing shortage, but it’s up to facility leaders to find ways to use the unique skillset of older nurses effectively.

Engage the experienced

To address the role of older nurses, we created an independent “Legacy Nurses Engagement Think Tank” that consisted of AORN past presidents and current and former board members, a perioperative nursing professor, a representative from the AORN Retired Nurses Specialty Assembly and a handful of younger nurses who represented the next generation of caregivers. We used our collective experience to survey nursing schools throughout Texas on how we, as a profession, could empower legacy nurses, uncover potential new roles (see “Survey Data”) and continue to shape the future.

It was encouraging to see that many facilities already actively support legacy nurses through mentoring programs, flexible staffing, succession planning, pre-retirement arrangements and volunteering opportunities. The good news for facilities that are looking to do more to support legacy nurses and tap into their wisdom and experience in the process: They don’t need to start from scratch. The International Centre on Nurse Migration published a report identifying a 10-point plan to support “older nurses” that includes ideas such as providing flexible working opportunities that meet older nurses’ requirements, supporting job redesigns and enrichment opportunities to optimize contribution and maintaining an effective succession plan to ensure knowledge transfer and leadership development.

Knowledge transfer

The transition to retirement is often the most difficult phase for older nurses. Many of these individuals have been so involved professionally that the transition to a non-scheduled day is a lonely prospect they dread — and something they may put off a little longer if the right opportunities present themselves. This is where the creativity of surgical leaders can help nurses transition smoothly into retirement and fill a void in their own facilities, especially in the outpatient realm where one person must cover multiple roles. For instance, a shared staffing program — with two nurses sharing one staff position, each working half a shift — is just one of many budget-friendly options available for leaders who are willing to look.

Ideally, the knowledge transfer from older, more experienced nurses to the younger generations that are coming in to replace them is already happening through formal and informal mentoring programs. The value of mentoring is immeasurable — but it’s not easy. There are major hurdles. Older nurses can be set in their ways, and the youngest generation of nurses (Gen Z) are often extremely self-sufficient; they don’t want someone to tell them what to do.

Often, small communication adjustments are all it takes to forge an effective mentor-mentee connection. I’ve mentored plenty of new nurses throughout my career, and I always try to frame what I’m teaching in a way that doesn’t appear as though I’m simply telling the person what to do. For instance, I mentored an extremely creative young nurse who was bursting with innovative ideas. The issue, however, was the way these ideas were presented, which was often in a written form. She was a fantastic writer, but her English wasn’t always as clear as it could be. I tried to work with her on a sentence-specific level; rather than simply saying “You need to change this; it doesn’t make sense,” I’d say, “I don’t understand this sentence. Can you explain it to me?” or “Have you considered rephrasing this …?” More often than not, this not only worked, but it also spurred new ideas, with the nurse adding, “What do you think about this and this and this?” It was a truly collaborative mentorship and, to this day, she calls me at least once a week to fill me in on her career or ask for advice.

Part of the solution

It’s crucial for leaders to recognize that near-retirement nurses have a wealth of information in their heads. Proper succession planning is vital to maintain an environment of continuity. Consider setting aside specific times or dates for these nurses to mentor their potential successors. Remember, good nurses understand the importance of transferring the knowledge they have gained to those who will replace them. It’s up to their leaders and managers to make this transfer as convenient as possible. Finally, the details of your facility’s exit interview are a core component of the knowledge-transfer process. Done right, you can usually find out what can be done better and what potential part-time employment opportunities are available in the future.

We are continuously shaping the future of perioperative nursing. With the significant shortage of nurses — specifically perioperative nurses — and the mass exodus of Baby Boomers, we face difficult decisions on how to staff surgical facilities to provide excellent patient care. We will see a greater volume because the elderly patient population is growing. Therefore, outpatient facilities will be under tremendous pressure to find creative ways to tackle the staffing crisis. Legacy nurses should be part of the solution. OSM