Clinical Placement Bottlenecks

A major goal of the healthcare industry is to ensure there is a robust and quality-trained nursing staff throughout the nation. Unfortunately, recent studies have identified that many individuals either currently enrolled in nursing training or at least considering it are not following through with their professional goals of becoming a nurse.

Students are frequently faced with long waiting lists for clinicals. This wait list is often directly related to a lack of clinical sites for training. The result is a shortage of graduating nurses. A nationwide study was recently completed to identify some of the methods of improving the clinical placement process. One method identified was the process of automating clinical scheduling.

Clinical scheduling is often a very time-consuming process that requires a significant amount of communication between hospitals, long-term care providers, training centers, colleges, and universities within a large region. Anywhere from 10 to as many as 50 organizations need to be communicating together to maximize the number of clinicals within their region. Automating clinical scheduling saves clinical coordinators and schedulers an enormous amount of time, and it is a proven solution to increasing clinicals through organization, teamwork, and schedule sharing.

http://www.clinicalplacement.org

In 2005, the East Central Michigan RSA for Health Care worked with Spicer Group, Inc. to streamline the clinical placement process. They developed an Internet-based system that has since been embraced by numerous healthcare employers including hospitals, long-term care facilities, colleges, universities, and training providers.

Since implementing this new clinical placement software, the East Central Michigan RSA has been presented with many questions from healthcare groups across the nation. Some of these questions, along with answers, are listed in our Frequently Asked Questions page.