Health care institutes as attractive employer for nurses

Health Care institutes in Flanders face serious problems keeping their nursing staff and attracting new nurses on the labour market. Barriers to employment remain despite the nursing shortage.
Many nurses have disabilities including mobility limitations and work –related injuries (f.e. back pain from lifting patients, allergic reactions through exposure to latex). 

Previous research showed that disability or illness is one of the main reasons not to continue working (at full capacity) in nursing. Knowledgeable nurses with years of experience are lost despite their wish to continue practice. Given the nursing shortage this is a problem. Therefore, we should explore complementary or alternative job functions for nurses. For example, nurses with mobility limitations could be succesful mentors/coaches for nursing students.

To date, nursing students learn in day-to-day practice by relative short nursing internships. Hence, the educational efforts are not capable of achieving the targets in practice skills, that the work field expects.

Numerous countries around the world have implemented other internship programs, aiming at improving students’ practice skills.  A particular example of the latter is one-on-one fellowship. One can assume that students who co-work with an experienced nurse could improve their professional skills.
The effects of such structured education in day-to-day practice, however, have not been scrutinized yet.

Therefore, we (i) plan to investigate how
health care organizations around the world
recruit and keep (disabled) nurses in the work field by specifying employment adds/alternative employment  and (ii) we plan to evaluate whether nursing students who co-work with an experienced nurse could improve their professional skills. Despite large scaled campaigns – both at the public and private level – the problem worsens continuously.