Health care: The new battleground in worker recruiting battles
Posted almost 10 years ago by Nicholas M Perrino
"As more people become insured due to the federal Affordable Care Act, hospitals, health clinics and physicians' practices all are dealing with a hiring crunch as they try to staff up and take care of the new flow of customers.
And that has led both to temporary workforce shortages and to new types of incentives as the various sectors compete against each other for many of the same advanced-practice nurses, primary-care doctors and physicians' assistants.
Community health clinics, which specialize in treating lower-income patients, often in rural areas, are offering participation in government-backed educational-loan repayment programs and paying competitive wages with deeper-pocketed hospitals, said Tanah Wagenseller, CCHN senior manager of workforce and training.
They also are pushing retention programs for those professionals they can recruit, offering time and space to mentor resident students, create innovative clinical strategies and work flexible schedules in order to spend time with their families, she said.
Rural and urban hospitals, meanwhile, are employing different strategies to help them stand out in recruiting battles, said Katherine Mulready, vice president of legislative policy and chief strategy officer for the Colorado Hospital Association. Rural hospitals are wooing providers with bonuses, while urban hospitals have a new tendency with specialty nurses in particular to offer to repay student debt.
'It's really difficult. There's a lot of competition, especially among primary-care providers,' Wagenseller said. 'And all primary-care practices are competing for those same kind of mid-level providers.'
The mid-level providers who are most in demand at hospitals, Mulready said, are specialty nurses — those who have experience in an intensive-care unit or surgical department. That is why, although some nursing schools are trying to ramp up the number of graduates to meet the soaring demand for high-level nurses, they still can't produce professionals with the qualifications that many high-activity areas of hospitals need."