A GAO report out this week on nursing at the Veterans Administration highlights a few key factors.

Morale among VA nurses suffers because they often perform tasks that aren’t core to their job, like answering telephones, changing bed linens, transporting patients for lab tests and drawing blood, the report says. A survey of VA nurse executives found a lack of other staffers around all the time to do things like housekeeping. That drives down nurse morale and makes retention difficult.

Work-life balance is also an issue. Back in 2004, Congress gave the VA legal authority to offer “alternate work schedules” to nurses — a 36-hour work week comprised of three 12-hour shifts (paid at a 40-hour rate), or the chance to work full-time for nine months and take three months off, for 75% year-round pay. But these options are rarely actually available to nurses. “Flexible” work schedules — like eight 10-hour shifts in a two-week period — are also extremely limited.

Half of all nurse executives reported that the lack of alternate and flexible schedules at their VA medical center was one of the primary reasons for difficulty competing with local hospitals in recruiting and retaining RNs, according to the GAO report.

The VA concurred with the report’s findings, and said it plans to create a new nurse staffing system that accounts more accurately for what patients need and what the nurses are doing, and also to convene a task force to work on the flexibility issue.

NAGE contends that there are numerous viable options available to the VA to improve the recruitment and retention issue for RNs; however the on going failure to assess and implement changes that are important to Nurses appears to hamper any long term improvement.  The GAO report underscores what the Local Chapter has said repeatedly for the past 4 years.