The past few years have left many hospitals and private practices scrambling to find and retain key employees. Low staffing levels affect the productivity of organizations in any industry, but the effect is particularly profound in healthcare. Adequate staffing levels are needed to protect healthcare personnel and provide quality patient care, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention notes.
If your organization is struggling to find medical workers, there are several steps you can take to deal with staffing shortages and improve the quality of care you provide patients.
Why Is There a Shortage of Healthcare Workers?
There are multiple causes of staff shortages in healthcare. More recently, burnout and exhaustion brought about by the Covid-19 pandemic have been factors causing healthcare workers to leave their jobs.
Other causes of the shortage have been ongoing for years. One contributing factor is a limited number of programs to train and educate nurses, doctors and other healthcare staff. Another major factor is the age of many currently employed in healthcare.
Many doctors and nurses are nearing retirement age or have recently retired. There just haven’t been enough new workers coming up to replace people who retired. Pew Research Center notes that the U.S. might have 124,000 fewer physicians than its needs as early as 2034.
Solutions to the Healthcare Worker Shortage
Solutions to the hospital staff shortage problem exist at the national, state, and individual levels. Some states are introducing more training programs to educate future healthcare workers today. A few are also relaxing licensing requirements, allowing medical providers to practice across state lines more easily.
Facilities in need of clinical support have several options for combatting the healthcare worker shortage.
1. Improve Retention Strategies
While many workers are leaving because it’s time to retire, many others are leaving their jobs because they are exhausted and burned out. Your facility can work to retain its staff by making the job requirements and expectations a little more attractive.
Retention strategies can include allowing for flexible scheduling for physicians and nursing staff, to allow them to get a better work-life balance. Another option is to increase the compensation staff receive.
2. Hire More Nurses
In certain areas, finding qualified physicians can be particularly challenging. If that’s the case, it can make sense to hire more primary care, advanced practice nurses.
Nurse practitioners, in recent years, have often stepped in to fill the gaps left by physicians. In many states, they can perform many of the same duties as physicians, such as ordering tests, diagnosing conditions and prescribing medications.
Hiring more nurse practitioners can also mean that patients receive the preventive care they need to keep conditions from developing or to keep pre-existing conditions from getting worse. Preventive care helps reduce the burden on the healthcare system.
3. Fill the Gaps With Short-Term Workers
Along with hiring more nurses, healthcare providers and hospitals can focus on hiring short-term workers. Short-term workers, or locum tenens, can fill in any gaps that might come up when one of your employees has to go on leave. They can also fill gaps created by nurses or physicians leaving the practice.
4. Provide Support to Employees
Healthcare workers need support just like any other employee. Support can take many forms, from providing workers with the option of taking time off to refresh to providing wellness programs such as meditation and yoga sessions or access to therapy.
Other support programs can include on-site childcare and access to gyms or fitness centers.
5. Make Your Facility an Attractive Place to Work
Your healthcare facility doesn’t have to take a page from startups and start offering employees break rooms stocked with snacks or ping-pong tables. But it can take steps to make itself an attractive workplace.
One option is to give workers the tools and support they need to move up in their careers. For example, you can create a program that helps entry-level workers gain the skills and credentials they need to move into more skilled positions. When people believe that they can grow with an organization, they are more likely to stay there.
Employees also want to know they are listened to and their concerns are taken seriously. Offer people a chance to provide feedback, then develop a system for responding to it.
