Nurses Week Blog Series: A time to heal. A time to learn.

In honor of the continuation of the Year of the Nurse through 2021, and this year’s Nurses Week theme Nurses, a Voice to Lead, we’re sharing stories from the nurses of Infor. In these posts our nurses reflect on their own experience as caregivers, discuss how the pandemic has highlighted the extreme pressures nurses have always faced, and highlight ways that they are voicing and supporting the needs of nurses through their roles in technology.

A pandemic is a natural disaster, non unlike a hurricane when it comes to what healthcare workers must face. Nurses and other caregivers are forced to step up in new ways, and we need to ensure they have the well-rounded experience and education to do so.

I am a former bedside nurse with 14 years in direct patient care. Today, I work as a Healthcare Solution Consultant with Infor People Solutions. This role offers me a different perspective on the role of caregivers, affirming the importance of ongoing professional development and safe staffing. This has never been more important than it has in the face of COVID-19.

I am in contact with a lot of practicing nurses. They are dealing with populations that are hit hard, and they find themselves floating to units outside of their comfort zone with little to no training. They are scared and overwhelmed. They are trying to do the best they can with what they have, and want to trust the technology solutions that work for them.

At Infor, we're helping our clients with safe staffing and easing the burden for those on the front lines of this crisis. Our healthcare workers and administrators have affirmed this over the last four to five months. Aside from fundamental health and safety tracking of COVID-19 exposure, we are seeing more demand for online learning modules, especially as they relate to the urgency of patients in the ICU. Nurses can quickly access fundamental ventilator and BiPAP training through learning content housed within Infor’s learning and development system. Other needed courses are also readily available and stressed healthcare workers have access to content on any topic and skill they need.

Completed, validated coursework feeds directly into the employee record within Global HR, so once they get that learning, they are good to go. It becomes part of their permanent employee record, readily available anytime. All someone needs to do is pull up the employee profile to see their skills, competencies, and training.

Our workforce management solutions have also proven themselves to be crucial as hospitals and facilities continue to face big staffing challenges. We are able to see a list of nurses in specific units, in real-time. To ensure safe floating is happening, you can quickly hover over an employee's name to see their skills and feel confident assigning properly trained nurses to provide safe patient care. Even better, Infor HR Talent provides you with the ability to create talent pools, providing immediate, fingertip access to nurses that have, for example, ventilator and triage training and experience. Critical nurses with critical skills to fill critical needs.

We all know that no two patients are the same. No care plan fits all. Two patients may have COVID-19, but one of them also exhibits sundowners syndrome. With Clinical Science, caregivers and nurses are matched with patients by their ability to handle underlying or contributing health factors demanding extra hours of care.

And finally, as we start to see ourselves emerging from the cloud of COVID-19, the lessons learned will extend beyond the pandemic. Career growth and development is an ongoing pursuit for all of my nursing and healthcare colleagues; we entered nursing with a commitment to being prepared for whatever comes next.