Background: Virtual Nursing Care Delivery Models (VNCDM) hold promise for alleviating bedside nurses’ workload, however, there have been few published reports of bedside nurses’ experiences with this new technology. This report explores bedside nurses’ perceptions of virtual nursing and absenteeism before and after implementation of a VNCDM. Method: In 2024 we conducted a six-month VNCDM pilot on a 35-bed adult orthopedic medical surgical unit in a Magnet-designated, 1134-bed New York City hospital. A third-party vendor provided virtual nursing services, which supported bedside nurses with admissions, discharges, and patient education. Bedside nurses completed pre- and post-implementation surveys, utilizing a five-point Likert scale to rate their anticipated (pre-implementation) and actual (post-implementation) experiences of virtual nursing’s effects on job satisfaction, stress, patient safety, patient experience, admission documentation, discharge documentation, and patient education. Nurses’ sick leave during the pilot was compared with the same six-month period in the previous two years. Results: In the pre-implementation survey (N = 41), nurses reported moderately positive perceptions regarding the potential impact of virtual nursing, with mean scores ranging from 3.4 to 3.8. In the post-implementation survey (N = 45), nurses’ perceptions were significantly more positive, with mean scores ranging from 4.0 to 4.8 (all p < 0.05). Sick leave was significantly lower during the six-month pilot compared with the same six-month period in the previous two years (p = 0.023). Conclusion: Following a six-month pilot, we observed reduced absenteeism among bedside nurses, along with more positive perceptions about virtual nurses’ ability to improve job satisfaction, stress, safety, patient satisfaction, and completion of patient education and admission and discharge documentation tasks. With a carefully planned rollout, VNCDM can be an acceptable solution to support bedside nurses with meeting patient care demands and mitigating factors that lead to burnout.
Lunt et al. (Thu,) studied this question.