MANAGEMENT UPDATE: Facilities Seek to Solve the Healthcare Employment Shortage

It is common knowledge that the industry is experiencing an across-the-board shortage of healthcare employees. But what is difficult to discern is how facilities can solve this problem at their own shops.
To maintain a stable employee workforce, more hospitals are looking beyond the traditional answers, engaging new and some times unusual retention and recruitment efforts.
"This is not the first time a shortage has occurred [in the industry]," says Karen Waters, vice president professional services, Georgia Hospital Association (GHA).
For a while, neither hospitals nor colleges were recruiting for the healthcare field, according to Waters. "It seemed everyone was focusing on the information age and IT positions. Combining this with the fact that there are a lot more choices for women these days, all these negatives came together at one time to cause an increased demand for coders as well as left openings in all areas of healthcare," she says.
The current vacancy rate for hospital coders alone is estimated to be 8.5 percent. Such acute shortages have caused many organizations to invest in their workforce, thereby dramatically improving their bottom line.
Managing the Labor
"The hospitals that have been able to document the costs involved in recruiting and then focused on retention do more to add to the bottom line than if they just look at the money," Waters says.
The first step is to gain a thorough understanding of the cost and value associated with a facility's employee base, job by job, department by department. What elements detract from or benefit the hospital by allowing it successfully to keep or attract employees?
A facility needs a balanced approach to such substantive components as salaries, benefits, labor utilization, and work processes, as well as to the intangibles like training, incentives, employee work environment, advancement potential, and patient satisfaction.  

What Employees Want
 Once a facility understands the value associated with its employee base, it needs to work to retain those employees. One way to accomplish this is to follow GHA's example. Waters says they constantly evaluate the employment setting to see what changes the facility needs to make.
Recent staff surveys at GHA, for example, indicated that compensation, benefits, flexible scheduling, intensity of work, opportunities to participate in decision-making, advancement opportunities, respect, communication, work/life balance, and working relationships are some of the major issues that affect retention.
"It's important that hospitals use that information as a way to prioritize the ideas or steps you will implement in a facility because it costs a lot when someone resigns [...]

- Published on 2003-03-01