5 Tips On Creating A Happy Work Environment.

• Start with yourself.

Determine that you will be positive no matter what. It all begins with you. Do not wait for another coworker to introduce the fun. You know that fun will lighten the day so be determined to enjoy your day.

• Bring in a healthy snack.

This could be a fruit or vegetable tray. When you bring in the snack, do not give it to your coworkers early in the morning or after lunch. Wait for a time when their last meal was two hours prior, like 3pm in the afternoon or 10:30 am. They will appreciate it more.

• Organize a coworker of the week game.

This is a game where you put everyone’s name in a hat and randomly pick one name. At the end of the week everybody says something they like about this person or mentions their strengths. Buy them a small affordable gift to show that you appreciate them.

• Celebrate birthdays.

Ask everyone when their birthday is and collect a donation to buy a cake. If you can bake the cake it will cut down on the cost.

Make sure you sing “Happy Birthday” for your coworkers.

It does not matter whether you have a melodious voice or not, make sure you enjoy the singing and tell them how special they are.

• Organize a pet of the month day.

Ask everyone to bring in a picture of their favorite pet. If they do not have a pet, they can bring a picture of their favorite animal.

After one week take a vote. The winner can get a gift card of about 10 dollars to buy their pet some food and if they do not have a pet they can just enjoy the money.

These are a few tips that will lighten the mood of everyone at your workplace.

Share with us some things that you do to create a happy work environment.

Source: internationalnursesupport

Pros and Cons of Healthcare Reform for Hospitals

3 Pros and Cons of Healthcare Reform:

Pros

1. Becoming more efficient: Healthcare reform and all its provisions are already making hospitals find new ways to increase facility efficiency, better manage care and streamline costs. One item is renovating hospitals to cut down on operating expenses. Hospital executives allocated 21% of their budget to renovations compared to 16% for new construction in 2012 according to an ASHE 2012 survey. Another method is implementing new programs such as Seton Family of Hospitals did when they enacted a nurse call center which on a monthly average dropped emergency room trips by 12.1%.

2. New model of care: Hospitals are moving away from the contemporary fee-for-service model, a contributing factor for our excessive healthcare spending, and are switching to value based models of care. Before, the more services hospitals performed, the more money they would make. Now, that is changing with hospitals being held accountable for their patients. Patient treatment outcomes versus cost are compared and hospitals who meet the requirements receive a bump in federal payments.

3. Helps the bottom line: Though there will be substantial cuts to Medicare, should healthcare reform pass, the vast majority of uninsured costs would be covered, giving some money back for what was previously written off. This suggests more money will be available to healthcare providers and, if the theory holds, a healthier population that needs less care over time. Alhough, it also depends on the specific hospital’s surrounding community and amount of care performed for indigent patients compared to Medicare patients.

Cons

1. Administrative costs: Hospitals and health systems will have more to do on their own as they take care of the influx of new patients. That is much more paper work, disease and care management, over-seeing and time dealing with Medicare for the millions of newly insured patients.

2. Coverage: The sheer act of providing coverage to more people would produce a new order of challenges. If access can’t be improved then there is still a problem of providing care. Medicare and Medicaid patients already indicate it difficult to find a physician, and coupled with the high attrition rate of doctors, finding healthcare providers to treat these new patients will be in increasingly short supply.

3. Cut in payments: Yes, there will be excessive decreases to Medicare reimbursements, around $112 billion in the ensuing years according to the Congressional Budge Office. There will also be a loss in tax breaks. These are viable methods the government issues to help hospitals meet their costs.

Source: healthcarefinancenews

Top 5 Interview Mistakes

As a travel nurse, you will probably find yourself in more job interviews than the typical nurse. Although you may find yourself more comfortable during these meetings than you did in your first years, those old nerves may have benefited you by encouraging you to prepare and look professional. Don't let a more casual attitude trick you into making any of these five mistakes.

#1 – Being Unprepared

It's easy to forget important interview tools when journeying to long-distance locations. Traveling is no excuse to skip professional dress and adequate preparation for your interview. Double check your wardrobe, review your answers to tough interview questions, and make sure you have a copy of your resume printed out before you board the plane or hit the road.

#2 – Not Researching the Hospital

After enough interviews, you may begin to feel that all hospitals are the same. Not researching your potential new working environment is a big mistake. Knowledge and passion about the position you are applying for will set you apart from other applicants.

#3 – Behaving Unprofessionally

If you're new to travel nursing your mind may be more excited about your upcoming adventure than your new job. Don't let this attitude appear during the interview. You want your interviewer to see you as a serious professional, not an overeager tourist.

#4 – Not Selling Yourself

Don't just go through the motions of a job interview. You need to actively sell yourself to your potential employer. Know your value and plan exactly what you want to communicate during the interview; then you just need to look for the right opportunity to say it.

#5 – Failing to Read Your Interviewer

No interview is exactly the same. Don't let past interviews color expectations for this one. Reading your interviewer will give you priceless tips on how to impress. Should you be friendly, warm, and outgoing, or serious, professional, and concise? Look to your interviewer for cues.

Source: parallonjobs

Hospitals can gain time and money with single-vendor distribution

According to a study released Tuesday by the Health Industry Distributors Association (HIDA), hospitals see substantial cost savings and greater employee and time efficiencies by maximizing their spend through a distributor, particularly in the areas of product ordering and receiving.

The Pricewaterhouse Coopers (PwC)-conducted study, called the "Hospital Procurement Study: Quantifying Supply Chain Costs for Distributor and Direct Orders,” looked at hospital purchasing practices for distributor and manufacturer-direct orders at 32 hospitals of varying sizes and locations across the country over the last 12 months, according to Matt Rowan, HIDA president and CEO.

“The study quantifies the efficiencies associated with the distribution channel,” said Rowan. “It’s a good business decision; time and money are saved by streamlining and having one single vendor handle as much as possible. It’s about employee productivity. Providers are able to spend little time working on distribution and more time with patients.”

According to Rowan, the study focused on hospitals that used a prime vendor distributor, and compared the time and related costs associated with distributor orders to those for manufacturer-direct orders.

Some of the major findings in the study include:

• Distributor orders are three times as likely to be electronic and average less than 30 seconds per purchase line order. Manufacturer-based orders average more than three minutes per line due to manual ordering and sign-off.
• Distributor-dominant practices such as advance ship notice reduce staff time spent reconciling receiving invoices and orders.
• Hospitals spent an estimated $67 per day receiving distributor orders versus $131 on manufacturer-direct orders.

The study notes that while some high-dollar products do not fit within common “cost-plus” distribution models, hospitals benefited from increasing the share of commodity products purchased through a single distributor, and from examining new models that can move expensive preference items through distribution as well.

“Using a prime vendor distributor is the clear winner as far as cost and productivity go,” said Rowan. “The study just reinforced the idea that hospitals need to be streamlining their resources. It’s cost-effective and requires little or no capital investment.”

Source: Healthcarefinancenews

How cloud technology can benefit healthcare supply chain

Cloud technology enables anyone — or anyone authorized — to use the Internet from anywhere to access computing capabilities and data that are hosted somewhere else, as opposed to onsite. The cloud offers considerable benefits to healthcare, which is undergoing dramatic and essential transformation without the necessary financial or technological means to support the level and speed of change required.

The term “cloud” actually refers to how the Internet has been depicted for years in diagrams and flowcharts — as a picture of a cloud. The concept itself dates back to the mid-1980s, when IBM first began leasing usage of the computing power of its large mainframe systems that, at the time, only the largest and most well-financed companies could afford to own. A decade or so later, smaller application service providers began offering Software-as-a-Service in the cloud to meet very specific business needs. The real advancement in cloud computing came when the technology enabled the major players, such as Amazon and Google, to logically partition their computing capacity in a manner that could be accessed by multiple clients in a flexible, secure and scalable manner.

Flexible. Secure. Scalable. These adjectives are mentioned most often when discussing the cloud’s value proposition, regardless of industry or application. They are certainly enticing attributes for healthcare, which faces increasing technology needs, security requirements and financial constraints. But the ability to create collaborative networks will likely be the most valuable to hospitals and other healthcare organizations.

One area in healthcare that can benefit from this technology is the role of the supply chain. There is a wealth of data in supply chain systems about products used in patient care. While hospitals have typically focused more on the price paid for products, better data capture about utilization and linkages with other systems and data can provide insights into how the products used in patient care impact both cost and quality, which will increasingly determine how providers are reimbursed.

There is also the operational role of the supply chain to consider, which is the second largest and fastest growing operating expense for most hospitals. In other industries, the cloud’s ability to facilitate supplier collaboration is seen as a source of operational efficiency and cost reduction. That value is being recognized more in healthcare. According to a 2009 HIMSS study, more than three-quarters of hospitals reported using an exchange, which offers supply chain applications in the cloud, to do business electronically with the suppliers from which they purchase the majority of their consumable products. Efforts are now underway to provide similar functionality and visibility for implantable devices. Given that implantables represent some of the highest priced and most sophisticated products used in patient care, the cloud has great potential to deliver even greater benefits from an operational, clinical and financial standpoint.

5 Tips For a Pain-Free Nursing Education

Anyone who’s completed nursing school can tell you where they floundered in their education. These could be big mistakes, such as choosing the wrong school, or small mistakes, like not “reading” an instructor very well. Nobody makes it through school without a few blunders, but if you follow these five rules of thumb, you should be able to avoid most of the big pit-falls.

1. Gain first-hand knowledge of a field before choosing it as a career path.

Any experience you can gain in the field, such as through volunteer work, family or friends in the profession, etc., will help avoid major career disappointments. When I finished nursing school, there was a couple in my class who graduated with wonderful grades, passed the RN exam, and within weeks opened a plant nursery in their community. Nursing, nursery: it’s a common mistake. Did they know what they were getting into?

2. Make a careful assessment of your career goals, short- and long-term.

Look at your goals and choose a direction that will work best for you and your family. Online courses and other flexible alternatives are making it easier to complete a nursing associate’s degree and certification programs. This makes it possible to complete one rung of the educational ladder, then work while earning another degree to the next rung. If you know your goals, you can tailor your education to save time and money in the long run.

3. Go straight to higher degrees, if that’s your goal.

If floor nursing isn’t for you, or if you have your heart set on administration work or other avenues of nursing that demand a master’s degree, then apply to a program that will get you there directly. Starting as an LPN and working your way up may only be frustrating. If you need to work (and most of us do) during the time it takes to earn a master’s degree, consider arranging an assistant position for yourself in the field you really want to pursue, instead of working in a local acute care setting or physician’s office. Still, there are exceptions: experience on the Med-Surg floor of a hospital or as a medical assistant in an ambulatory care setting can add value to any career you plan to enter.

4. Avoid changing schools.

If or when you change schools during your educational path, there will be classes that the new school won’t accept. Work experience that you might get credit for in one school may not be accepted by another. And most schools (even if you’re two classes from your degree) will insist that you take a minimum amount of credits from them before you graduate with a degree in their name. So be careful about choosing your school and diligent about completing a degree or certificate before moving on to the next.

5. Accept that nursing school will be a major part of your life.

On the first day of nursing school, my instructors said, “Don’t expect to work or have a relationship while you are in this program.” That was many years ago, and programs have become much more “user friendly.” Still, it’s safe to say that nursing school is incredibly intense and time consuming. Between the clinical and classroom hours and the out-of-class time spent studying; it is to say the least, demanding. Everyone has family obligations, and many people work while going to nursing school, but take care not to expect too much of yourself during this period. Don’t burn-out before you have completed your education.