Giving Back Time to Nurses Amidst Workforce Challenges
OSF HealthCare is an integrated not-for-profit Catholic health system that serves nearly 1 million patients across Illinois and Michigan. OSF HealthCare employs more than 24,000 Mission Partners in 147 locations, including 15 hospitals.
Since the start of COVID-19, hospitals all over the world have faced a number of critical challenges, from managing an increase in patients needing higher levels of care to clinician burnout and staffing shortages. With another wave of the COVID pandemic occurring in late 2021 and no sign of the virus backing down, OSF nursing leadership saw an opportunity to tap into the minds of their own teams to discover novel solutions to these problems.
In partnership with The OSF Innovation Team, The Nursing Leadership Team launched an innovation challenge to collect targeted ideas around ways to improve the experience of caregivers, prevent burnout and allow them the time
and space to serve patients with the greatest care and love possible.
The innovation team worked with Ideawake to design a custom workflow, allowing key decision-makers to review ideas, streamline the decision-making process, and sort ideas into different categories for future implementation.
Over a six-week period, more than 600 nurses were invited to participate in the challenge and were able to collaborate in real-time using Ideawake's real-time chat, upvoting and tagging features to highlight powerful ideas.
The challenge resulted in the collection of more than 100 ideas that were categorized into five focus areas. These included:
The leadership team assigned leads to each focus area for vetting and implementation and provided regular updates to challenge participants and the broader team.
