Improving the Work-Life Balance of Registered Nurses

Seminar paper from the year 2015 in the subject Health - Public Health, grade: 1,5, University of Queensland, course: Strategic Human Resources Management, language: English, abstract: The Mater Private Hospital is the biggest hospital of Mater Health Services. Its main strengths are the long tradition and good reputation due to a high healthcare quality. The focus on high quality is also positioned in its vision to become the leader of compassionate and exceptional healthcare. Currently, reaching the vision is at risk. Due to a poor work-life balance the job satisfaction as well as motivation of nurses decreased. In addition, high stress levels lead to a poor nursing outcome and impair the healthcare quality. Furthermore, an increasing turnover rate causes lowered organisational cost efficiency and high recruitment costs. An internal and external analysis of the labour market, the MPH, and the role of nurses, showed the great importance of a good WLB, a high commitment and a high retention rate. Since one of MPH's main goals is to continually improve its employment offer in order to increase the retention rate, it is recommendable that it implements an intervention that increases the WLB, job satisfaction and retention rate. Two possible interventions have been examined: (1) Flexible Working Hours and (2) Mentoring Programme. The recommended intervention for the MPH is implementing a Mentoring Programme. It shows the same advantages in its outcome as the flexible working hours (higher job satisfaction, better WLB, higher commitment). However, it has more advantages than flexible working hours: it also improves older nurses' retention, improves the team environment, and improves the knowledge and education of younger nurses. Therefore, it contributes to achieve the MPH's vision by increasing the healthcare quality. A generated action plan, including key actions, success criteria, timescales, resources, responsibilities, monitoring and evaluation against success criteria shows a detailed implementation strategy. After the implementation it is recommendable according to the CHRM framework to continually assess and improve the mentoring programme.