Some health systems are turning to virtual nurses as the latest strategy to help address the ongoing nursing shortage.
Patients at Trinity Health, one of the nation’s largest nonprofit health systems, will soon be receiving care through a team of on-site nurses and a nurse who videoconferences into the patient’s room. The hybrid nursing delivery model will be operational in 38 Trinity nursing units across eight states by the end of the month, the Michigan-based health system announced last week.
“This model not only confronts the imminent challenges we face as clinicians, through creativity and ingenuity but also enhances care delivery and bolsters job satisfaction—paving the way for the nurses of tomorrow,” Murielle Beene, Trinity SVP and chief health informatics officer, said in a statement.
How it works. Trinity’s Virtual Connected Care model delivers care through a team of three nurses: a direct care registered nurse, a bedside nursing assistant or licensed practical nurse, and a virtual nurse who works remotely from a local Trinity campus.
The virtual nurses connect with the patient via the TV in their room and a high resolution camera fixed on the wall, Gay Landstrom, Trinity’s chief nursing officer, told Healthcare Brew. These virtual nurses have access to the patient’s medical records and can use the camera to zoom in on the patient and check their heart monitor or examine a wound, for example, Landstrom said.
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Virtual nurses “have picked up on patients who are having neurological changes like having a stroke, and they picked up on it through the camera and called in the stroke team,” Landstrom said. “They’re able to do so much on a virtual basis that I think people don’t realize.”
Tackling the shortage. This nursing model could help bring experienced nurses back into the workforce. Trinity employs nurses in virtual positions who have years of bedside experience, but who may not be able to work in person due to an injury or the physical challenges of the job, Landstrom said.
“We’ve not had a role for them in the past that allowed them to stay in patient care. So this model, the virtual nurse, is ideally one of those nurses—all that experience, all that mentoring capability, but maybe physically can’t do bedside patient care,” she added.
The experienced virtual nurses also serve as mentors for the typically younger registered nurses working bedside. Nearly 800,000 nurses are expected to leave the profession by 2027, and younger, less experienced nurses are driving the workforce decline, Healthcare Brew previously reported.
Trinity is aiming to implement the virtual nursing model in 2,500 inpatient acute care beds by March, Landstrom told us.
“Virtual nursing…will allow us to bring expertise to patient care, to those early career nurses, and really change care for the better,” she said.