Challenges faced by healthcare organizations in nursing staffing and recruitment.

 

 

Episode Introduction 

 

Healthcare is facing a crisis in nursing recruitment. A combination of burnout, high workload, low wages, and retirement means staffing levels are falling. To reignite the passion for nursing, hospitals must explore more innovative ways of working. In this episode, VIE Healthcare Consulting’s founder and CEO Lisa Miller interviewed Matthew Mawby, co-founder of StaffHealth.com on the challenges facing hospitals, and effective strategies to attract more nurses.  

 

Show Topics 

 

• Factors that contribute to nursing burnout 
• Mental health and nursing 
• Unequal compensation and unequal budgets 
• Recruitment process outsourcing as a solution 
• Listening to nurses 

• Offering scholarships to attract new recruits 
• Family involvement supports nursing 

 

Show Links 

4:31 Factors that contribute to nursing burnout 

Matt explained the problems nurses face when hospitals are short-staffed. 

‘’I mean, the nurses are overworked because they're short-staffed. On the floor, right, as a nurse, and you don't have help and you have, let's say normal, normal will be maybe 10 to 15 patients, something like that. Now, they have 29 to 30, sometimes even 40 patients with no help. I mean, it's mind-blowing how much work it is, and then they're short-staffed, and then the next shift, they don't show up, or maybe the relief doesn't show up, or they get COVID. That was a big thing is they're getting tested positive for COVID and they had no symptoms, so they're sent home, so now what? Now, they call us, a company like ours and we send in a nurse right away. We did a survey that got picked up by about 400 news outlets. We did a survey for about 300 nurses. 82% of those said wages could help burnout. If they're paid more, they would probably work more, right? 62% of those individuals wanted to change careers and said, "Hey, I'm out of here," because they couldn't handle the pressure, they couldn't handle the long hours with the low pay, and 54% said it had a negative impact on their mental health. What does that really say, right?’’ 

7:05 Mental health and nursing 

Matt said that offering mental health resources, including group therapy, can help to address underlying issues, but compensation is also a factor.  

‘’The mental health, you're right, is a big piece. From the perspective of the nurse, I think it's a factor of many things. I think it's being overworked, number one, and what I really want to point out, and to back up the nurses really, really good here is that nurses were heroes last year, literally. They were announced as heroes last year. This year, it's kind of not there. I think a majority feel that they're not valued as much as they should be, and I think that also goes with compensation, too. But we're offering mental health resources ourselves. We're pressing and hoping that healthcare systems will also offer maybe some group therapy or even someone to talk to, someone to address issues because it is at home, too, and you have pandemic. I hate to say this, but people are dying every day still from COVID, and they see that every single day, so it takes a toll after a while on mental health. I think compensation goes into that a lot. I really do.’’ 

 

08:35 Unequal compensation and unequal budgets 

Matt said traveling nurses are often paid more than employees, but budget is a factor too. 

‘’It's such a great point because you have two sides of the healthcare system. You have the healthcare systems who have huge budgets, right, and they can afford to pay a $25,000 sign-on bonus for a travel nurse for a 13-week assignment, maybe even more, right? You're right, how does that feel with someone who's making barely the minimum wage for a nurse, right? Then someone comes in just making all this money, talking about it, chatting about it, and it's frustrating. But the other side of that, Lisa, is the facilities that don't have that budget. What do they do? They're struggling. That's a huge percentage of that. What people don't talk about also is the administrators at these facilities, they're burned out, too. They have to control this whole facility, they have to make sure it's staffed properly, they have their higher-ups pressing that, they get fined by the state or the federal government if they're not staffed properly, so it has everybody in a scramble to get people in the door to work.’’ 

 

11:31: Recruitment process outsourcing as a solution  

Matt explains how StaffHealth.com offer a cost-effective process to alleviate the staffing crisis.  

‘’We just implemented this more recently, but we have a great program that we actually innovated. It's kind of like an RPO, for recruitment process outsourcing, right? We actually help administrators and help facilities get interviews in their door. Basically, we are doing that process, that process that takes so much time, which is marketing, which includes ads, job advertisements, that budgeting, right, for that, we handle that. We interview the people. We get to know your company, your culture at the facility. We interview those people. We vet them, credential them. We take that whole process for you and minimize it, right, because we're doing it all. Then we get candidates in your door to interview. It's up to you if you hire them, but we're taking that process, and we're doing that process for you. It has been a huge relief for facilities because that legwork is tedious and it takes time, so we actually do that whole process for them and it's been a great success with that. That's way different than just doing the per DM staffing and the PRN staffing way different. This is a kind of left field, right? This is helping the facilities get back on their feet. The pandemic crushed a lot of people, a lot of facilities with budgets, so we're doing that in a cost-effective way that's easy for the facility to handle, so it's been a great resource for these facilities.’’ 

 

14:04: Listening to nurses 

Matt said listening to what nurses want enabled them to offer two innovative solutions.  

‘’Yeah, we listen to our nurses. That's huge for us. We're very passionate here on what and what we do and we're here to help everyone, the facilities, we're here to help the nurses, we're here to really bridge that gap. By listening to our nurses, we want to bring back that passion, that passion for the nursing industry that everyone used to have. We want to bring that back. Part of that, and this also has been minimizes burnout and everything else, but we offer obviously the flexible scheduling. We have an app, right, and they can just go and pick up shifts, say, "Hey, you know what? I have my child on Friday, he's off school. Okay, I'm not going to work Friday," so they can do that. They can control their schedule with a click of a button, too. Then we promote career development, obviously, and we want to see everyone succeed. Then the same-day pay that we offer, everyone gets a pay card, a debit-type card, and we load that money up as soon as their shift's approved after they're done working. A lot of people live paycheck-to-paycheck and that really, it gives them control of their finances and the flexible schedules. Those two items have just been tremendous help for everyone.’’ 

 

18:30 Offering scholarships to attract new recruits 

Matt said scholarships can help to address the long-term shortage. 

‘’I believe that exactly what you said, I mean, offering scholarships, getting people in school, I believe the passion needs to be there, and really getting people into school. I mean, you're starting schools what, three years, sometimes four years to get through that program, so you're talking 10 years to get the big, huge influx of new hires, new grads, but offering incentives, we have to, per se, beef up the nursing shortage, and we're looking at many ways to make it more passionate and really tackle that and get people excited to work again.’’ 

 

20:10 Family involvement supports nursing 

Lisa suggested that involving families in care helps to alleviate the pressure on nurses.  

‘’I had an interesting conversation once with a nurse who said, "The reality is that the family members are helpful, the ones that are involved, they are helpful. They get to be a second set of eyes can help us. But some hospitals don't always want the family members there." But she was great. She was a floor leader. She's like, "I love having family members there because I know they're watching, they're caring, and that's initial support." You just wonder if we have to start thinking about that again as a way to support nurses, to say, you know what, do we get the families back involved?’’ 

 

Show Links 

 

Connect with Matthew Mawby  

Connect with Lisa on LinkedIn 

Check out VIE Healthcare Consulting 

 

You’ll Also Hear: 

 

The causes of the current nursing shortage; the combined effects of mental health pressures, burnout, retirement and poor compensation. ‘’CNAs…are paid the same as employees at Walmart and barista at Starbucks, so we're losing healthcare workers to other professions.’’ 

 

Understanding the causes of burnout, and the survey results that found that 82% of nursing staff felt improved wages could help.  

 

Why administrators don’t get enough credit for the work they do. ‘‘Charge nurses spend time off the floor to just recruit new nurses to get interviews in the door. Can you imagine that pressure? …I personally give a huge shout out to the administrators in handling that.’’  

 

Innovation solutions offered by Staffhealth.com, including a comprehensive RPO for recruitment process outsourcing, to enable facilities to recover from the impact of the pandemic in a cost effective way.  

 

The combination of innovation and technology that aims to bring back passion for the nursing industry, with flexible scheduling and ExpressPay™.  

 

Bridging the gap between staffing and healthcare organizations. ‘’Patients at the hospital need to go to long-term care facilities, and they have no nurses at long-term care facilities, so they can't discharge the patient. That means that there's a bed not available because they can't be discharged, so we're working really hard to bridge that gap.’’ 

 

Predictions for the future – and how the pandemic brought telemedicine forward by 10 years.   

 

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