A partnership built with care

When human resources manager Kelly Terrell put the word out that the Thousand Oaks Surgical Hospital was hiring nurses, she expected to have a tough time filling positions.

California, after all, is in the midst of a serious nursing shortage, lacking anywhere between 7,000 and 21,000 to properly serve the state’s population, according to a 2005 analysis by the Center for California Health Workforce Studies and UC San Francisco.

Instead, Terrell was flooded with 1,500 resumes. She whittled them down, then started setting up interviews. “I conducted 1,000 interviews to hire 100 nurses,” she says. “They were dying for the opportunity.”

Many, she recalls, had rusty job-seeking skills. “They weren’t prepared to interview, because they usually don’t interview,” she says. “They walk into a hospital, show their RN license, and they’re hired.”

The state’s nursing shortage is expected to only get worse. California will need 11,000 additional nurses annually through 2010, according to the governor’s 2006-07 budget estimate. Nurses are such a hot commodity that not only do they often breeze through simple or nonexistent interviews, they’re often lured with hiring bonuses or fitness club memberships.

A job at Thousand Oaks comes with its own perks, such as free meals in the lounge prepared by chef Anthony Huber for patients and staff. (Recently, it was chicken vino blanc over angel hair pasta, with zucchini and garlic bread.)

But the real reason nurses flock to specialty hospitals is so that they can do their jobs the way they were trained to. Regular hospitals are supposed to staff nurses at a ratio of one for every five patients, but sometimes they just can’t do it. For patients, the result is unanswered call buttons and harried professionals at the bedside.

The doctors who opened specialty hospitals created them partly for their own professional satisfaction, as well as for their patients’ comfort and needs. Among other things, they aim for a manageable ratio of one nurse to three or four patients.

Turns out, that’s great for doctors, great for patients -- and great for the nurses too.

“In the year and a half since we’ve been open, we haven’t lost a single nurse,” Terrell says.

“I love it,” says Chiqui Jonez, a recovery nurse at Thousand Oaks who enjoys the challenge without the hassle. “We have more nurses per patient, so we can give better care.”

Patients notice it. Gary Wartick, who had prostate surgery at Thousand Oaks Surgical Hospital last year, was so impressed that even as he recovered, he started asking the nurses questions. “Two of the nurses told me that if they hadn’t made the change, they would have quit the profession because of the stress.”

Nursing at Thousand Oaks differs in other key ways. The hospital has no nurse’s aides, no orderlies, no social workers. The nursing staff takes care of the patients, bathing them, delivering their meals and planning their discharges.

With fewer patients to tend to, nurses have more time to do the medical monitoring and medication adjustments that they’re trained for.

It’s old-fashioned, hands-on nursing, giving the nurses the opportunity to talk, listen and know as much as they can about patients during the few days they’re in the hospital.

“To be here is what a nurse dreams of,” says Cindy Correlli, who has been in the nursing profession for 20 years. In previous jobs, she felt that she only had time to know patients medically, body part by body part. In her new job, she says, she gets to know them as people.

“It’s very frustrating in most hospitals,” she says. “The patients aren’t happy because the little things aren’t taken care of. The doctors aren’t happy because they can’t find a nurse, and don’t even know who the nurse is. Here, it’s a partnership.”