Nurse concierges harried hospital employees get their own caregivers.

• Author: Smith, Kathy
• Position: Attitude at Altitude

How does a nurse on a 12-hour shift manage a laundry list of errands? Get the Father's Day gift in the mail on time? Have that little black dress, or his tuxedo, cleaned in time for the weekend family wedding?

Take the errand list, the gift for wrapping and the last-minute dry cleaning to work.

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In some Colorado hospitals nowadays, such chores are being turned over to an in-house concierge service: an employee benefit of convenience if not price (the employee still has to pay some costs) provided by hospital administrators in order to make their facilities more attractive to workers who are becoming as precious to the hospital workplace as the lives a hospital saves on a daily basis.

The hospitals are following a national trend. According to the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics, registered nurses are ranked No. 1 on the list of the top 10 occupations with the largest projected job growth in years 2002-2012. But the nation's nursing corps is mostly aging and retiring, and fewer new nurses are being educated, creating an anticipated shortage of more than 1 million nurses by the next decade.

As hospitals and other health-care agencies and institutions prepare for the shortfall, more and more are using new benefits like the availability of concierge services to attract and retain personnel. And providing such services is not only a convenience; in many cases it's becoming a medical necessity: An American Nursing Association survey found 56 percent of nurse respondents believe the time they have available for patient care has decreased, and 75 percent said the quality of nursing care at their facility has declined over the past two years.

"Research shows employees spend 1 1/2 to three hours daily on non-work-related activities while on the clock," said Todd Wheeler, owner of Concierge Colorado, one of the concierge companies trying to sell its services to local hospitals throughout metro Denver. Concierge Colorado operates at just two area facilities, Presbyterian/St. Luke's Hospital in Denver and Littleton Adventist Hospital, but Wheeler says his mission is larger than that, and his company is getting good grades from clients so far.

"We are here to change health care, not just as a request processor," Wheeler says. "We have never had a complaint that hasn't turned into an opportunity. We go out of our way to make everyone happy." He says at P/SL, where Concierge Colorado has worked for two years, the company has had...