Top 5 Biggest Nursing Challenges in 2024

This CNO has advice for the huge challenges facing nurse leaders as we enter the new year.

As we dive into the new year, CNOs must be prepared to deal with the new and ongoing challenges facing the nursing industry. Lisa Dolan, Senior Vice President and Chief Nursing Officer at Ardent Health Services, has laid out what she thinks are the five biggest issues that nurses will face in 2024.

5. Burnout

Burnout is a widespread issue for clinical staff throughout all of healthcare, especially since the pandemic.

“The roles are so difficult at times,” Dolan says, “and so being able to have a healthy work environment for people to feel comfortable in, and not experience the rate of burnout that they have over the past several years [will be key].”

CNOs should be open and talk about burnout, and validate that it is a real issue. Dolan recommends wellbeing check-ins and holding debriefings after serious incidents with patients, and finding creative ways to help staff adjust when they encounter big life events.

She also says recognizing people and celebrating their wins is crucial, and getting feedback from patients is a great way to give that recognition to the nurses who care for them.

4. Frontline nursing leaders

Retaining frontline nursing leaders will also be on many CNO agendas. Retention is already difficult in nursing, and it’s crucial that frontline nursing leaders be present long-term for their units to help promote teamwork and to maintain a strong workplace culture.

“It’s one of the toughest positions in the hospital,” Dolan says, “So being able to retain and support those frontline leaders will be key.”

3. Innovation

There are all kinds of new technologies arriving at the forefront in nursing, and it’s the CNO’s job to know how to incorporate them correctly into nursing strategy.

“There’s so much great innovation going on,” Dolan says, “but how we incorporate [technology] so that it’s helpful to the nurse and not adding additional burden to the nurse is especially important.”

Virtual nursing and virtual care platforms are keys to the future, according to Dolan. Virtual care in nursing can help with data collection, patient admission and discharge, patient education, and family education.

“There’s many things that a virtual nurse can assist a bedside nurse to complete and do,” she says, “and [they] actually feel like they have more time to spend with the patient.”

Dolan also emphasizes the benefits of wearable technology and smart rooms. Wearables can help nurses monitor vital signs and patient status, freeing up staff so they can spend time completing other tasks. Wearables also have the potential to help with hospital to home care, because patients can continue wearing the technology that will keep monitoring their progress.

Smart rooms and smart room technology also will add to further advancement in patient monitoring, and help take some of the burden off nurses. Smart rooms can hear and listen, which opens up the possibility of real-time transcription of the documentation nurses record for patients. This technology could also help prevent workplace violence or safety incidents from escalating too much, Dolan says.

2. Stabilization of support roles

One of the biggest challenges in nursing is stabilization of support roles. It’s becoming more and more difficult to be competitive in staffing support roles, which Dolan says is a key concern.

“As nursing becomes more and more taxed,” she says, “It’s especially important that we have a support team around the nurse.”

1. Supply of nurses

At the top of the list is the supply of nurses. The demand for nurses is outpacing the supply, and it is essential that CNOs use their influence to implement strategies to help fix this problem.

“Trying to help re-energize the public about healthcare careers and how fulfilling they can be is a key piece and a key role for the CNOs going forward in their communities,” Dolan says.

She also believes that creative partnerships with academic programs and institutions can help produce more nurses. Both healthcare and academic settings are short-staffed and need help, and there is an opportunity for one to provide support to the other, and vice versa.

“If we can be creative in our partnership efforts with those academic settings to help augment their staffing and clinical instructors, and allow them to take additional students,” she says, “that would all be very helpful as well.”

Jumping into the new year

Several other trends will continue to affect nursing in 2024. Dolan believes we’re going to see continued emphasis on quality and safety measures in the workplace, for both patients and staff.

“That whole focus of pay for performance and meeting all of those key metrics is going to be continue to be really important,” she says.

At Ardent Health Services, she says they will see a transition from a patient experience in the hospital to a consumer experience across the whole system. This shift in strategy considers the experience of patients when they interact with system processes, such as making appointments or accessing their health information through their Epic chart.

Additionally, health systems will experiment with new care delivery models. Since there are not enough nurses to support historic approaches, there will be new team approaches to care, Dolan says.

“That whole ability for people to work as a collaborative group, and come together [to] care for a patient,” she says, “I think is going to be key into the future over the next year.”

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