Navy Nurse Corps manpower management model

Abstract

The Navy Nurse Corps is part of a team of professionals that provides high quality, economical health care to approximately 700,000 active duty Navy and Marine Corps members, as well as 2.6 million retired and family members. Navy Nurse Corps manpower management efficiency is critical to providing this care. This paper aims to focus on manpower planning in the Navy Nurse Corps. The Nurse Corps manages personnel primarily through the recruitment process, drawing on multiple hiring sources. Promotion rates at the lowest two ranks are mandated, but not at the higher ranks. Retention rates vary across pay grades. Using these promotion and attrition rates, a Markov model was constructed to model the personnel flow of junior nurse corps officers. Hiring sources were shown to have a statistically significant effect on promotion and retention rates. However, these effects were not found to be practically significant in the Markov model. Only small improvements in rank imbalances are possible given current recruiting guidelines. Allowing greater flexibility in recruiting practices, fewer recruits would generate a 25 percent reduction in rank imbalances, but result in understaffing. Recruiting different ranks at entry would generate a 65 percent reduction in rank imbalances without understaffing issues. Policies adjusting promotion and retention rates are more powerful in controlling personnel flows than adjusting hiring sources. These policies are the only means for addressing the fundamental sources of rank imbalances in the Navy Nurse Corps arising from current manpower guidelines. The paper shows that modeling to improve manpower management may enable the Navy Nurse Corps to more efficiently fulfill its mandate for high-quality healthcare.