Since the St. Louis American profiled Tommye Austin, BJC HealthCare Senior Vice President and System Chief Nurse Executive, last October, she has made her presence known in positive ways.
She completed an analysis of the nursing division and patient care systems with 14 chief nurse officers and created a list of priorities.
“Our turnover was around 20%, but we’ve reduced it to around 17%. That means we still have multiple vacancies in nursing. We’re seeing the biggest gap, where nurses want to enter the profession, is medical surgical nursing,” -Tommye Austin
“We’ve started to take some actions,” she said.
“The first one we’ve been working on is our workforce, and that’s in collaboration with our talent acquisition or human resources department.”
Austin said BJC is launching specific campaigns for hiring nurses to combat the national nursing shortage.
“We have been able to add associate degree nurses to our care delivery model, and we have been able to add licensed practical nurses to our care delivery model, which is one aspect of the workforce, in addition to improving relationship with colleges,” Austin said.
BJC accepts nurses who have associate degrees and, to engage them, Austin said they have them perform clinicals at BJC facilities so that the major healthcare provider can hire them.
There are more than 800 nurse vacancies at BJC HealthCare, according to its website.
“Our turnover was around 20%, but we’ve reduced it to around 17%. That means we still have multiple vacancies in nursing. We’re seeing the biggest gap, where nurses want to enter the profession, is medical surgical nursing,” Austin said.
Another way Austin is working to increase and maintain BJC’s workforce system is by adding virtual nursing.
“We’re piloting virtual nursing at Progress West and St. Peter’s. This virtual nurse is helping to perform the admission assessment while the physical nurse might be off doing something else, she said.
“We’re also using the virtual nurse to help admit our patients who are avoided in the emergency rooms.”
According to Austin, BJC is still experiencing overflows of patients in its emergency rooms.
She is collaborating with staff to address patient outcomes, which includes “looking at the types of beds that we have, having enough staff to assist patients, and innovative technology.”
“We’ve seen an improvement in our patient experience. Patients say that the nurses are attentive and you know that they’re responding to them when they need assistance and when they say nursing that includes the patient care assistant or a patient care technician that works alongside the team because it takes a village to take care of patients,” Austin said.
“We have seen an improvement in our patient experience, and to me that’s an indicator that one, our staffing is stabilizing, but also that the nurses have the time to really provide that high level touch that is needed for great patient outcomes.”
One of Austin’s priorities for the health care provider is ensuring the institution be able to provide stroke care to the region, a major milestone for the organization.
Ensuring that this level of care is provided across the board has been a task Austin sought to accomplish early in her time at BJC.
“We were one of the first institutions to provide stroke care to a teenager,” Austin said.
“We are making sure that all our nurses are educated in regard to stroke care but there are so many things that we do as an organization to make sure that we have great patient outcomes.”
Austin brings more than 30 years’ experience in the nursing field, having most recently served as the Senior Vice President and Chief Nursing Executive for University Health, a health system in San Antonio, Texas.
Austin was also part of Barnes-Jewish Hospital celebrating their fifth consecutive Magnet Award win for nursing.