Merging Nursing Teams? Key Points to Implement

Retention of nurses is essential to manage turnover costs and nursing shortages. An area that has remained relatively unstudied is the impact and success of inpatient nursing mergers. A single site qualitative descriptive triangulated case study research design was developed to explore the overarching strategy in an intra-hospital merger of clinical units that included leadership tactics and strategies and the structure of the merger process that affected the success of merging the two units. One-on-one interviews were held with management, leadership, and staff nurses. Pattern matching was performed for each interview question to triangulate similarities and find connections among the interviewed groups. Seven themes resulted from the analysis and eleven initial recommendations resulted from triangulating the three groups’ responses which led to the final nine recommendations regarding intra-hospital unit mergers. Findings include new information for nurse managers to utilize during intra-hospital unit mergers to decrease complications during the process and increase the overall success of the merger.