Nadia Taeckens
Pronouns: she/her
Research Mentor(s): Amanda Schutz
Research Mentor School/College/Department: Department of Internal Medicine / Medicine
Program: UROPF
Session: Session 6 (3:40pm – 4:30pm)
Authors: Nadia Taeckens, Jordyn Disbrow, Amanda Schutz, Thomas Valley
Abstract
Providing healthcare to the 2.7 million Veterans who reside in rural areas poses a unique challenge. Although one-third of US Veterans live in rural areas, only 10% of VA physicians and nurses provide care in these rural areas. Understaffed rural VA hospitals are forced to place more responsibility on existing staff, leading to burnout and turnover, which may result in worse patient outcomes. The SERVICE (Supporting Excellence for Rural VAs Providing Inpatient Care) project aims to identify the causes of staff turnover in VA inpatient care, and to evaluate the extent to which various strategies that rural VA hospitals use to recruit and retain staff are successful. Qualitative methods used in SERVICE include serial interviews with health care staff at 10 urban and rural VA hospitals that will take place over two years. In addition, we will conduct interviews with HR staff at VA hospitals to gain insight into recruitment strategies. SERVICE will also use interview transcripts from a previous project that focused on non-VA rural ICUs to compare and contrast the challenges that rural non-VA and rural VA hospitals use. The project is in its initial stages and is expected to take four years, so full results have not yet been found. However, some emerging themes from the pilot data are that lower wages contribute to staff shortages in rural VAs, that having a workplace community is a strong factor in retention, that work-life balance can aid rural VA recruitment, and that lack of desire to live in a rural area can contribute to difficulty in recruiting staff for rural VAs. If the full study provides further insight into these emerging themes, this would have significant implications for how VA administrators approach staffing at rural hospitals. These findings can be used to improve staffing policies for rural VA hospitals, reduce turnover, and provide Veterans with consistent and high-quality care.
