Patient Placement Nurse IV, Capacity Management

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Organization:

SMCS-Valley Administration

Position Overview:

Responsible for coordinating and optimizing patient flow in acute care facilities to ensure appropriate use of resources and timely patient care. This role involves collaborating with multidisciplinary teams to manage bed assignments, admissions, transfers, and discharges, balancing patient needs with health system capacity. The nurse works closely with hospital leadership, physicians, and other staff to assess real-time capacity data, predict future capacity challenges, and implement strategies to mitigate overcrowding. Strong clinical judgment, problem-solving, and communication skills are essential for ensuring smooth operations and delivering high-quality patient care.

Job Description:

These Principal Accountabilities, Requirements and Qualifications are not exhaustive, but are merely the most descriptive of the current job. Management reserves the right to revise the job description or require that other tasks be performed when the circumstances of the job change (for example, emergencies, staff changes, workload, or technical development).

JOB ACCOUNTABILITIES:

PATIENT PLACEMENT SERVICES:

• Leads the command center in the coordination of patient movement and bed assignments, based on appropriate level of care and patient aggregation from health-system emergency departments, perioperative/procedural services, direct admissions, patient transfers, within the hospital and transfers from other hospitals identified by the transfer center, for health-system admission.  
• Interacts with physicians, nursing staff, and administrators of system hospitals on the placement of patient populations in each acute care hospital and respective nursing units, by assessing patient diagnosis, acuity and location, applicable risk factors and unit criteria/bed availability.
• Leverages capacity dashboards and other real-time indicators to monitor real-time patient flow and capacity data to ensure efficient use of hospital resources.  In addition, predicts future patient placement pressure points and participates in the execution of surge-capacity protocols.
• Communicates regularly with acute care hospitals to anticipate and respond to changes in patient volume.
• Facilitates market multidisciplinary capacity management huddles to review and expedite patient movement across all hospital campuses.
• Collaborates with physicians, nursing staff, and administrators within the health system to resolve bed availability issues.
• Develops strategies to address capacity constraints and minimize wait times including proactively level loading patients, with a working knowledge of each service line and level of care, across the health system.
• Liaises with nursing and providers to facilitate patient discharges, inter-facility and intra-hospital transfer processes.
• Ensures that patient care remains uninterrupted and aligns with hospital policies
• Coordinates accurate, current/up-to-date census and patient bed availability information for all system hospitals. 
• Tracks the location of staffed beds available, allowing efficient patient placement for delivery of appropriate patient care.

CLERICAL:

• Performs general clerical tasks, such as answering phones, retrieving, entering, and revising patient electronic health records (EHR).
• Prepares and completes accurate documentation related to patient placement.

SAFETY:

• Maintains a clean, neat and safe working environment.

EDUCATION:

Graduate of accredited school of nursing.

CERTIFICATION & LICENSURE:

RN-Registered Nurse of California - California Department of Consumer Affairs

TYPICAL EXPERIENCE:

2 years recent relevant experience

SKILLS AND KNOWLEDGE:

To perform this job successfully, an individual must be able to perform each essential duty satisfactorily.

• Demonstrates expertise and resourcefulness in level of care requirements, advanced nursing assessments, bed capacity management, service line capabilities, and acceptance pathways by care site.
• Demonstrates expertise in development, implementation and evaluation of specific transfer and bed management program.
• Demonstrates a high degree of critical thinking, problem solving and negotiating skills.
• Demonstrates ability to communicate effectively with all interdisciplinary team members, referrals agencies, patients, families, and other services.
• Demonstrates excellent customer service and professional administrative skills.
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