By Dr. Mame Yacine Gueye, DNP, RN, NEA-BC
The restructuring and redesign of the Central Staffing Office (CSO) float pool aimed to enhance nurse satisfaction, retention, and operational efficiency across an extensive healthcare system. With over 400 nurses floating between 15 hospitals, the pre-existing system assigned nurses to managers based on alphabetical order. The former assignment often negatively affected nurses with mismatched and unfamiliar leaders of their clinical backgrounds.
The review of the literature and best practices especially highlighted the importance of manager-nurse assignments (Keyes, Hamdayi & Alsaadi, 2025). Using the Plan-Do-Study-Act (PDSA) model, this author developed a policy. It reassigned float pool nurses based on clinical specialties, such as critical care, medical-surgical, and perioperative.
Five nurse managers participated in evaluating the new policy through surveys. Their positive response confirmed that clinical assignments between nurses and managers improved performance management, communication, and satisfaction (Church & Grubaugh, 2025). This author’s leadership formally adopted the policy, laying a basic structure for better handling float pool resources. The CSO redesign helped reduce the dependence on contract labor and excessive overtime and aligned financial and staffing purposes. Implementing the new assignment project revealed that float pool operations presented unique communication, consistency, and engagement challenges. One of the most critical lessons was the power of aligning nurses with managers who understood their clinical scope and could advocate appropriately. Float pool nurses often felt underutilized due to the transient nature of their work (Ryu & Jiang, 2025). The author’s leadership assisted the nurses in assigning leaders with the same clinical background. Consequently, the result was increased employee retention and improved job satisfaction.
Additionally, it was essential to have leadership buy-in (McDonald et al., 2019). Without CSO managers’ support, the project implementation could have encountered obstacles. Applying regular feedback loops, such as monthly meetings and post-survey follow-ups, was critical in maintaining accuracy and adjustment as required.
A significant challenge was the lack of initial data on nurse-managing assignments from the research literature, making baseline measurements difficult. This process also highlighted the inequalities in how float pool operations were seen in hospitals, requiring a culture change to see float nurses instead of temporary nursing help (Jones et al., 2023).
Finally, continuous improvement demands continuous evaluation. Future stages will include tracking retention rates and optimizing the manager-to-nurse ratio. Overall, this project emphasized that CSO success depends on staffing logistics, fostering meaningful professional relationships, and long-term engagement.
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