Mastering the dynamics of implementing a PRN nurse talent pool strategy in the current healthcare environment means that flexibility and reliability of the PRN staff are essential, and non-negotiable. As the healthcare industry continues to evolve post-Covid19, and face challenges, such as a nursing shortages, the requirement to maintain an adaptive PRN nurse talent pool is essential. We’ll tell you why.
Because of the increasing patient load and ongoing shortages of nursing staff, many healthcare facilities are using PRN nurses to guarantee that there is consistent quality care, and those all important “nurse to patient ratios“, are in place for the patients. However, it is important to develop a good strategy for identifying and managing PRN nurses, and this absolutely requires the help of a trusted PRN staffing partner that is both technologically advanced and responsive to your daily needs.
This article explores the various aspects of PRN nurse talent pool strategies, with a particular focus on the advantages of working with a PRN staffing partner, and the levers that leadership of healthcare facilities can pull to enhance their PRN flex workforce to cover all of those situations where “life just happens”.
PRN Nurse Talent Pool Strategies Are Necessary Because Life Happens
A PRN nurse talent pool is a strategic database of potential healthcare professionals that healthcare organizations can tap into to fill unexpected, or planned job openings as they arise. People have last minute emergencies. Your favorite professional that holds it all together has to do something for their aging grandmother. The CNA’s all have a cold or flu at the same time. The list goes on and on. Preparedness is the key to being ready for anything that the world throws at you.
This PRN partner approach allows healthcare facilities to build a pipeline of qualified healthcare professionals, significantly reducing the time and effort required to fill vacancies. A well-managed talent pool can enhance the daily staffing process, lower turnover rates, reduce nurse burnout, lower your healthcare staffing overtime costs, and ensure that healthcare organizations have the right talent to deliver exceptional patient care.
Effective PRN talent pool management involves identifying, engaging, and maintaining a solid relationship with your PRN staffing partner. Talent pools are particularly useful in addressing the nursing shortage, which continues to challenge healthcare facilities nationwide.
By building a pipeline of qualified PRN nurses and professionals, healthcare facilities can reduce their reliance on hiring full time employees, and embrace the way that healthcare professionals want to work in 2025 and beyond. This proactive approach ensures that healthcare facilities are always prepared to meet their staffing needs, cover their nurse to patient ratio requirements, and ultimately deliver better patient outcomes.
Why Should Healthcare Facilities Setup A PRN Nurse Talent Pool Strategy?
Well, the short answer is because you never know what’s coming your way. The unknown seems to always step up and surprise healthcare facilities. They know it’s always coming. It just happens. Why so many healthcare facilities bury their heads in the sand on the certainty of uncertainty is a mystery.
Although some healthcare facilities have managed their PRN nurse talent pool strategies on their own, working with a staffing partner provides several benefits:
A Larger Pool of Potential Candidates: PRN staffing partners have a large number of qualified PRN nurses and other healthcare professionals who are looking for work, which saves you the time and money that would have been used in the recruitment process.
PRN staffing partners are not created equally though. Many PRN staffing partners are essentially just glorified staffing agencies, with little to no care on who shows up to a healthcare facility, as long as they check the boxes on what’s required by the state the work in. Find a PRN staffing partner that has high standards for their talent pool.
Minimized Staffing Workload: This is what they do. The good ones are extremely passionate about doing that one thing. It is not an afterthought, or something they dislike doing on a daily basis. Their onboarding, credentialing, and compliance processes are tuned up and optimized. This frees up your full time staff internally to do the heavy lifting, while your trusted PRN partner does what they do best.
Advanced Technology And Automation: In 2025, the process of scheduling and placing nurses should be highly driven by technology and automation. Advanced technology for scheduling shifts, booking healthcare professionals, and communicating with the PRN nurse staff, are requirements, “not nice to haves”.
Partner with a PRN nurse staffing partner that deploys cutting edge technology and AI driven tools that lower your costs, and save you time. Time is the only thing we cannot get more of. Focus on clawing back your time by embracing technology in the healthcare professional staffing segment.
Cost Effectiveness: The most glaring upside of establishing a PRN nurse staffing pool strategy is that PRN nurses reduce overtime costs. This is due to the fact that PRN staffing partners can, and should provide you any flex or float healthcare professionals. Why would you want to pay overtime, and explode your overtime costs, when highly qualified PRN professionals can augment your amazing internal staff. PRN agencies also have the numbers and can therefore get better prices for the PRN nurses than what you would pay your full time staff on your own.
Risk Analysis: PRN partners ensure that all the laws and regulations relating to employment are followed to avoid legal consequences such as misclassification or lack of documentation. Additionally, they help you stay compliant by keeping your nurse to patient ratios, and census in check. The regulatory space overseeing healthcare facilities is complicated, and creates very strict requirements for healthcare facilities.
Selecting The Best PRN Staffing Partner For Nurse Talent Pool Strategy Deployment
It is important to choose the right PRN staffing partner to help you get the most out of this approach. When choosing an agency, there are a few factors that you should consider. Some of them are;
Experience and Scope in the Industry: It is better to go for agencies that are well versed with the healthcare staffing industry and fully aware of the challenges that you are likely to face.
Quality of Talent: It is important to find out how they identify and retain PRN nurses to ensure that they are qualified and experienced nurses who can provide valuable insights and enhance the overall hiring decision-making process.
Technology and Processes: Review their scheduling, communication and compliance management tools to see how they design them to support your work.
Customer Service and Support: Assess their timeliness in responding to your calls and emails, the manner in which they communicate, and the level at which they stick it out for both you and the PRN nurses.
Compliance and Credentials: Check on their compliance with industry standards, licensing and regulations to avoid certain risks that are associated with the industry.
Creating Your PRN Talent Pool: A Teamwork Approach to Address the Nursing Shortage.
Work with your PRN staffing partner. Just as you will have some hit and miss as you establish and in house workforce, you can be certain that humans will be humans, and you will experience some short term bumps as you implement a PRN talent pool.
Partnering with a PRN staffing agency dose not mean that you have no control over your workforce. Quite to the contrary, you are in more control, because hiring a staffing partner that specializes in high quality talent, means you have hired another full time employee. Your PRN partner IS your full time, engaged and dedicated resource to develop your talent pool, so they are ready to go at a moments notice.
Proper healthcare workforce planning involves the systematic identification and analysis of both the current and future demand for healthcare workers, ensuring alignment with the healthcare facilities goals.
Here are some key steps in collaborating with your staffing partner:
Determine Your Needs: Describe the type of PRN staffing that you require, the level of experience that you need, the shifts that you want to fill with PRN staff, and any other requirements such as license or certification. Work with them and provide feedback on the professionals that come from the agency partner. You will build your “bench” of professionals with the partner.
Develop a Complete Onboarding Plan: Your PRN partner should be able to help you develop a good onboarding process that will allow the PRN nurses to learn about the facility’s policies, procedures, and culture. It’s essential to get them up to speed quickly.
Establish Communication Protocols: Establishing a clear communication plan and expectations for both you and the PRN partner will help in avoiding misunderstandings and providing frequent updates.
Learn To Utilize The Partners Tools And Technology: Healthcare facilities should take full advantage of the PRN partners extensive time and cost saving tools. There are hundreds of thousands of dollars of annual savings hiding in the deployment of the PRN partners extensive tool sets. Remember, this is what they do. The spend most of their time doing two things. Cutting your costs. Saving you time. PRN partners like NurseIO have developed extensive toolsets that do exactly this.
Here are a few examples:
AI Automated Shift Booking: Talk to your phone through SMS, and NurseIO’s automated AI assistant “Ella”, will do anything you can do on a computer to book your shifts. This saves thousands of hours a year of inputting shifts into the computer.
Choose Your Favorite Healthcare Professionals: This tool allows healthcare facilities to offer shifts to to their favorite staffers, and put those staffers on the facilities “bench”, amongst other staff oriented features and benefits.
Save 25% Of More On Your Staffing–Guaranteed: This tool will calculate your needs based on the staffing input you provide and tell you instantly how much you can save annually by deploying PRN staffing into your facility.
Eliminate Fraud And Time Sheet Audits: This tool allows healthcare facilities the ability to track all hours that PRN healthcare professionals are on site. This completely eliminates fraud, and reduces the requirements to conduct time sheet audits, which saves you extensive time and costs.
See the whole suite of PRN staffing tools here.
As you incorporate technology into your strategy and work with your staffing partner, you can develop a strong system for managing your PRN talent pool and address your ever-changing needs in order to deliver the best possible patient care.
Conclusion
To get and maintain a good PRN nurse talent pool you need to have a good strategy, and this can only be boosted by working with the right PRN staffing partner.
Strategically managing healthcare talent is crucial for overcoming persistent challenges such as workforce shortages and high turnover rates. With their help, you can create a model of a flexible and sustainable workforce that can help you address your varying needs, decrease your operational costs, and, in the end, provide better patient results.
While planning to implement this model, it is important to understand that effective communication, partnership, and focus on quality are critical to achieving the maximum value of your PRN nurse talent pool.
Reach out to NurseIO today, and schedule a demo of our toolset today. You will save costs and time. That’s a guarantee.
