Five Ways to Tackle the Labor Shortage at your Healthsystem
Struggling to find enough staff for your hospital? Healthcare organizations across the US are combatting the worst staffing shortages and turnover rates seen in the last decade.
Following the COVID pandemic, healthcare demand is at an all time high. Combine this with clinician burnout, high turnover, and an aging workforce the number of physician labor pools is not large enough to manage patient needs. Labor shortages affect the quality and availability of clinical care that can be provided to patients. Outside of patients struggling to get quality care when they need it, labor shortages impact organizational labor expenses and create disruptions in critical workflows.
What’s causing these shortages? According to a recent report by Optum, 47% of healthcare leaders cited training costs as the leading workforce disruption, 35% identified worker exhaustion, and 33% identified lack of skilled talent. It’s clear that the cost to train and retain staff is a huge pain point for many organizations.
How can organizations tackle this growing problem? There are several solutions that can be implemented to help alleviate the pain felt from an understaffed workforce:
Maximize your Onboarding Experience: Onboarding new employees in clinical settings is often costly due to organizational procedures and technologies that new team members have to learn. Organizations should work collaboratively to simplify and consolidate new hire training and technologies used to minimize onboarding runways. This is a great opportunity to leverage digital technology such as digital assistants to embed training directly into workflows. An assistant allows for ongoing training and reinforcement of critical procedures, ensuring that classroom training is extended into daily work.
Reduce Barriers in Communication: Care team members shouldn’t have to spend time chasing down the right person. Create simple call trees and easy retrieval methods for employees to reduce time spent completing administrative tasks and maximize time spent providing patient care.
Reduce Bureaucratic Tasks: The latest Arch Collaborative report by KLAS found that the second leading cause of physician burnout was bureaucratic processes. Work with staff to determine what processes are redundant and create barriers to efficient workflows. Collaborate across operations, compliance department heads, and IT to determine what processes can be eliminated and what tasks can be automated.
Evaluate Compensation and Benefits: Evaluate the compensation and benefits provided to employees across the national average and your competitors. Work with department heads to determine what employees have had to take on in addition to their standard workload with smaller team sizes and what would help incentivize quality talent to stay. Additionally, evaluate your contract labor rates and determine if some of that spend is ongoing and could be funneled into FTEs instead. This could reduce the likelihood that your staff will jump ship to join a contract labor force rather than remain within the organization.
Maximize your Staff's Efficiency: Reduce staff burnout and increase productivity by implementing solutions to streamline processes. There are a wide variety of technical solutions that can help automate redundant tasks, eliminate context switching, and reduce your staff’s workload in a user friendly and safe manner.