Saint Luke’s Nurses Avoid Burnout Through Virtual Meetings

Posted August 23, 2023

As a strategy to avoid valued nurses potentially leaving their profession, Saint Luke’s Healthcare System has provided its nurses with a way to ease their burnout through virtual means.

Saint Luke’s Healthcare has nurses offering to help their patients remotely with a touch of a call button, Becker’s Hospital Review reported.

Nurses through virtual meetings work to answer patient questions and handle a significant amount of administrative work, including admissions and discharge tasks. The health system claims allowing nurses to work freely remotely also benefits nurses working the floor, freeing up space for bedside care.

Saint Luke’s virtual nursing department, launched in February 2022 with early results showing patients are discharged within two hours of the discharge order, some 20 percent faster than in other units, and they’re also out of the hospital before noon at a 44 percent faster rate, reducing patient wait time.

The pilot program started with 33 beds in one unit and has been scaled to serve patients in 550 beds in eight hospitals across the health system, Becker’s reported.

Saint Luke’s virtual nursing is also designed for experienced nurses who are looking to slow down their work or exit their profession.

The demand for remote nursing jobs has seen an enormous rise of 392 percent since March 2023, according to an increase in job postings on Indeed.

Based on Indeed’s data, “telehealth” and “telehealth nurse” were among the 10 fastest-growing searches on Indeed between March 1 and April 13, 2020.