Addressing the Healthcare Staffing Shortages With Data and Empathy

The healthcare industry is an ever growing entity that thrives on the strength of healthcare professionals across the world. As science and medicine advances, the industry continues to experience significant growth in its hospitals, patient facilities and healthcare networks.? While the healthcare network has proven to be a bustling hub for talent, the introduction of Covid-19 and its strenuous demands have caused a noticeable decline of talent in the last two years. As the virus plagued hospitals across the world many physicians, nurses, and staff members were tasked with longer days, fewer rest periods, and high amounts of both physical and emotional stress.?

The result of these events have led to a rapid decrease in both nurses and physicians. In fact,? Within the last year over 20% of nurses said they would be leaving their current positions in exchange for non healthcare related roles. These findings come at a time when the average number of nurses needed to replace retiring nurses sits at over 200,000 per year. When asked about their decision to leave many physicians and nurses cite severe feelings of exhaustion as their reasoning for making a career shift.?

The glooming number of healthcare individuals leaving the field comes at a time where their workplaces are the most vulnerable and most importantly, patients need them the most.? While it may not be as visible to employers, the optimum strategy to combat this talent shortage is for the organization to assess the current status of their practices, and identify areas to improve the care of their nurses, physicians, and staff. While achieving these ideas may prove to be challenging, it is worth the additional effort in order to preserve the healthcare industry’s capacity.?

Reducing understaffed areas?

While it may seem that the cause of exhaustion begins with the duties performed each day, the actual cause may be rooted in the lack of support and extra hands in the department. The immediate goal for any professional tasked with preserving their teams, would be to begin the work in the areas that have the least amount of team members with the greatest responsibility. Members of the teams are highly likely to experience exhaustion as they are the sole providers of their respective areas. Individuals in this area can not only benefit from the increase of assistance, but it may also grant the opportunity to present greater focus on their role which later increases the positive attitude for the services they provide. As the talent in these troubled departments increases, the percentage of individuals leaving their roles will begin to decrease while morale increases.?

The acquisition of new talent must also come with the feedback and request of the current members of staff. Hiring managers must sit with the leaders of their departments to identify what roles require immediate filling. For instance, a team may have a saturation of day-time nursing staff, but a scarce team of nurses working the night shifts. It is important that the correct talent is hired across critical areas to avoid further loss. Blindly making these decisions without supporting data would waste company resources and staff morale.?

Placing emphasis on the retention of staff

Many companies have incentivised new hires by granting sign-on bonuses and additional benefits in an attempt to attract greater talent. While this tactic may provide temporary relief, it is a stop gap. The bonus insensitive is not guaranteed to attract top talent and or long lasting talent. Many individuals may seek out this employment opportunity as a quick way to earn extra money with little to no desire to remain invested in the company nor its patients after one year. The efforts spent on these bonuses will gradually be lost as new employees experience exhaustion as well as the loss of the money and resources used to onboard these associates.?

Instead of placing emphasis on bonuses for new associates, companies will need to provide those incentives for the current population of experienced professionals. These professionals serve as the strongest population in the company. They have proven loyalty and determination through the most challenging moments of their careers and for some, their lifetime. Retaining these associates will provide the greatest return investment as they have already proven their commitment to the overall success of their organization.? Companies will need to provide greater benefits packages in the form of additional paid time off, pay raises, as well as company amenities. Simple solutions such as providing meals, counseling services, and quality rest periods may be enough to retain long term employees.?

Identify internal associates who want to grow with the Company

The most efficient strategy to reduce the shortage of professionals is to access the talent the organization already has. Introducing new candidates to a population of individuals that are experiencing high levels of stress and dysfunction may not be beneficial. The associates enduring these conditions are more likely than not to understand areas of improvement and may provide the strongest voice for reconstruction. These individuals have direct experience with the demographic of patients, expectation of care, and operations of their facility. The best candidates to solve workplace issues are highly likely to already be members of the staff.?

In addition to their feedback, selecting these individuals as the next nursing managers, attendings, and office managers, empowers their performance and increases the likelihood for employee satisfaction. These individuals have the respect of their peers as well as a sharp sense of direction for the talent needed to grow the team.??

Here are three immediate initiatives that healthcare companies can take

1. Leverage existing data

The World Health Organization advised countries to improve their capacity for health workforce data collection, analysis, and utilization in its 2020 State of the World's Nursing report. Patient data has gotten a lot of attention in the past. ? However, a good understanding of the most expensive component of a healthcare delivery system - people – can help to solve the Quadruple Aim.

Most HR systems report and display data from a single source and do not integrate with other operational systems. HR data, time and attendance data, survey data, exit interview data, email activity data, EMR metadata, and even third-party data such as social media and other third-party municipality and geographic data are all critical to gaining a comprehensive insight of your workforce. Using the helicopter as an example, even if the GPS mapping display can establish location and calculate a course, it is not enough to fly.

Make a list of the data you've gathered and look for ways to combine it. Insights are frequently discovered at the intersections of such data. Even if you decide to remain with single-source HR data, ask front-line managers what they require.??Actionable insights can be generated once your data sources have been conformed to a business-ready dataset and personas have been established to represent your workforce.

Advanced analytics improves communication between employees, policymakers, and decision-makers. When properly designed and implemented, it also provides actionable insights to overburdened front-line managers, allowing them to better lead their teams and engage with individual employees on a more personal level.

2. Implement data-driven engagement programs for your providers in the same way that you do for your patients.

The importance of customer experience in establishing brand loyalty is well understood by marketing departments. Health-care organizations must concentrate their efforts on developing loyal and engaged workforces. Recognize what your employees appreciate outside of money and design around it. Persona development and design thinking ideas are excellent tools to use in this situation. Personas are a human-centered design technique that "personifies" quantitative data acquired for a certain segment in order to create empathy when creating for that segment.

Unfortunately, healthcare firms rarely develop employee personas. Healthcare directors must be empathic toward their employees when working with and understanding such a complicated, multi-generational workforce.

3. Consult with doctors, nurses, and other members of the staff.

Digital tools and technology have a lot of promise for improving healthcare, but they won't be able to make a significant difference without the help and leadership of care teams. Rarely is such information actively sought. Beyond physicians, there is a need to engage care teams. Nurses have been generally excluded from discussions about the design and implementation of these systems.

Improving Our Approach

Large volumes of data from sources including EHRs, IOT Devices and reference data (both public and private) surveys can aid in the detection and tracking of illness trends, the identification of inequities, and the discovery of correlation patterns. Nurses, on the other hand, are required to assist in the development of artificial intelligence and improved visualization approaches that will allow these technologies to scale.

While there is a laundry list of methods to be used to decrease the shortage of talent in the healthcare industry, it is no secret that organizations will need to change their approach to both their hiring methods and working environments. The future of healthcare individuals will be those that have used the strength, knowledge, and power of their experiences to fortify their future.?