Staffing Robot - Healthcare Staffing Technology, Design & Marketing Blog

Healthcare Staffing Agencies Help Both Hospitals and Nurses During Strike

Discussing the politics between unions, hospitals and striking nurses is always a touchy subject. Lately, however, this subject continues to come up as nurse unions threaten strikes all around the country.

In June, the largest nursing strike in the nation was planned with over 12,000 Minnesota nurses striking and thousands more nurses from the University of California hospital system, prepared to walk out.

Strikes are never optimal situations for any of the parties involved. Nurses participating in the strikes stated that nurse-to-patient ratios and large hospital profits with no employee pay increases were core to the issue. The unions went as far as to state that the nursing strike was predicated on "unfair labor practices." Such a label means nurses can collect unemployment compensation for their time away from work and the hospitals cannot permanently replace them.

The hospitals feel such a stance from the unions is too strong and detrimental to their ability to deliver quality patient care. Many nurses actually worry about the patient care issue as well. For most, it is the primary reason why they don't strike more often. A major difference between nurses going on strike and workers in other industries is that the lives and care of patients is involved. Even a temporary lapse of care can put lives in danger. When nurses are ready to strike because of an imbalance in staff-to-patient ratios, justifying a walkout that exacerbates this situation is difficult.

Therefore, being prepared for a strike is the best situation for both hospitals and their healthcare staff. The best way for hospitals to be prepared for a strike is to have strong contracts with reputable staffing agencies that can have staff ready to go in a strike situation. Having such contracts can ensure the best bill rates for strike situations and more importantly, that your facility will have trained, oriented staff ready to go.

Establishing such relationships doesn't just benefit the hospitals by helping them keep their doors open, it also provides nurses and the public with the comfort they need in knowing that patients are still being taken care of. For example, A Superior Court Judge in California was successful at preventing the recent nursing strike by issuing a restraining order just prior to the strike. The grounds of the order suggested that the strike would cause a danger to the public. However, if hospitals are prepared at all times with trained agency staff there is no reason a lapse in care should occur. 

It's true that employing temporary staff in a strike situation is more costly in terms of pay rates and orientation costs. Further, many staffing agencies charge higher rates for the last minute, critical needs. However, the more prepared a hospital is for such a situation, the more affordable temporary staff become and the better trained they are to start providing good patient care on day one.

A suggestion for hospitals would be to have some sort of 'Strike Insurance' agreement with one or more of your staffing agencies. This 'insurance' would perhaps be something you pay for monthly, quarterly or annually and would allow you to identify key temporary staff that you have screened and oriented to your facility. It would also help you negotiate better rates so that paying for such a service would go towards the bill rates during a strike, keeping the rates reasonable and your budget more manageable.

I'm not sure if there are any staffing agencies out there that offer such a service but I think it's one worth considering. There is a great opportunity for all sides to make a bad situation more manageable. Healthcare staffing agencies can help both hospitals and nurses during a strike if more creative solutions are sought. I'd love to hear from any hospitals or staffing agencies that have been part of a strike situation to learn what their process and overall outcome was.

The Healthcare Staffing Report - Headline News (5.17.10 - 5.21.10)

This weeks headline news stories from The Healthcare Staffing Report.

Here is a list of this weeks top Headline News:

Monday:  Nurses Key to Quality Patient Care Improvements

Tuesday:  Increase in Temp Hires Point to Recovery

Wednesday: Labor Shortage Still a Problem for Healthcare

Thursday: Hospitals Under Budget, Regulation Pressures

Friday: Hospitals Fined for Putting Patients at Risk

This Weeks Top 5 most popular categories (based on clicks):

1. Staffing Agencies
2. Healthcare Professionals
3. Top Industry News
4. Hospitals & Health Systems
5. Social Media Marketing
6. Vendor Management

Please follow The Healthcare Staffing Report on Twitter.

Medical Solutions Nurse's Week T-Shirt Design Contest

A few weeks back I blogged about Favorite Healthcare's video contest for Nurse's Week. I thought you should be aware of another staffing agency that is sponsoring another great contest for Nurses's Week.

Medical Solutions and Fibers.com are putting on a contest titled "Give it a Shot!" The contests asks "Nurses and Nurse-aficionados" to create t-shirt designs showing their appreciation of the Nursing profession.

Nurse's Week is May 6-12 and this contest ends on May 12th. Here is the link to learn more about and participate in the Medical Solutions Nurse's Week contest.

They've also created a YouTube video to promote the contest:

 

Shortage of Physicians in the U.S. Only Getting Worse

This article from the Wall Street Journal talks about the increasing shortage of physicians in the U.S. and how it looks as though it will only get worse. To make matters worse, many people believe that the new healthcare reform act will cause more people to consume healthcare resources, thereby increasing the need for healthcare professionals even more.

"It will probably take 10 years to even make a dent into the number of doctors that we need out there," said Atul Grover, the AAMC's chief advocacy officer.

Obviously an increased need for healthcare professionals will benefit the healthcare staffing industry. However, many measures need to be taken to ensure the shortage doesn't grow to severe. Even though healthcare reform will positively affect the healthcare staffing industry, too severe of a shortage will hurt us all as a country. Unfortunately, the healthcare reform bill did not go far enough in addressing the growing need for healthcare professionals.

Proponents of the new health-care law say it does attempt to address the physician shortage. The law offers sweeteners to encourage more people to enter medical professions, and a 10% Medicare pay boost for primary-care doctors.

This map is a great visualization of the shortage of physicians across the country.

Favorite Healthcare Nurses Week Video Contest

Favorite Healthcare is sponsoring a contest for National Nurses Week this year. They are asking you to submit a picture or short video of you and your nursing friends. From the submitted entries, Favorite Healthcare will create a video and launch it on YouTube for Nurses Week. 

All participants will be entered in a raffle to win one of three Netbooks.

To participate, submit your pictures and videos by April 23rd, along with your contact information, to YouTube@FavoriteStaffing.com.

To kick it off, Favorite Healthcare has made their own video. You can watch it here.

TweetDeck Launches New Recruiting and Job Service - JobDeck

My favorite social media site is Twitter. Although there are several tools for interacting in different ways with Twitter the best tool out there by far is Tweetdeck. I've mentioned this app several times in previous posts, particularly on how staffing agencies can use Tweetdeck for recruiting and new business leads.

Tweetdeck has now expanded this ability even more. By partnering with TwitJobSearch, a Twitter-based job search engine, Tweetdeck now offers a custom branded interface that finds job and recruitment related Tweets called JobDeck.

Essentially, it's Tweetdeck with two additional columns added by default: ‘Job Search Experts’ and ‘TwitJobSearch’. Add in your own personal search columns, in addition to your Facebook and LinkedIn columns, and you have a fantastic source for online recruiting.

In addition to posting on Twitter, with a few extra steps, recruiters can also have their tweets posted and indexed by TwitJobSearch, helping them to more effectively connect with potential candidates online. You can also post premium job listings, or "Tweetured" (terrible name) as they call it, on the TwitJobSearch site on a Cost Per Click (CPC) basis. 

I'm curious to know if any of you start using this service and what the results are.

Should Hospitals Focus on Eliminating Their Agency Staff?

It's a question that never seems to go away. Can hospitals truly eliminate all of their agency usage? Perhaps a better question is - should they? From a management perspective, the healthcare staffing industry seems to be one of the last to see the usage of temporary labor as being negative.

By now we've all read the L.A. Times article that highlighted some bad practices of a few staffing agencies and used these examples to paint the entire industry with more negative stereotypes.

The American Staffing Association had a great response to the article that was necessary and expected. What was nice to see, however, is people like Rebecca Hendren from Healthleaders Media who has written a couple of excellent articles on how hospitals can better manage staffing agency professionals. In her first article Rebecca discussed how positive work environments and better orientation practices can improve the process for working with agency staff.

This week, Rebecca wrote another article about how hospitals are making effective use of technology to reduce their reliance on agency staff. She points out hospitals that have effectively deployed internal staff scheduling software to fill more shifts with internal staff, offer more scheduling flexibility and improve morale. The Healthleaders Media article made several great points on this topic and I wanted to add a few of my own.

1. It's no secret that scheduling software applications can dramatically improve a hospital's staffing situation. However, software won't solve the nursing shortage. It bothers me to say that. I'm a huge believer in technology but sadly, it will not solve all of our problems. Even though the economy has given us the illusion that the shortage of healthcare professionals has decreased, this is only a temporary situation (no pun intended). All analysis suggests the shortage will only continue to get worse. According to the Bureau of Labor, at 23%, the demand for nursing will be much greater than the average for all other occupations between 2006 and 2016. So no matter how efficient the software, if there's no staff to manage - there's no staff - and working with temporary labor is still necessary.
2. Deploying a solution to better manage your internal staff while ignoring the management of staffing agencies won't solve your hospital's staffing problem. Hospitals need a solution that will manage all of their staffing - both permanent and temporary.
3. The article includes some popular generalizations about the use of healthcare agency staff such as: using agency requires more organization and effort and that it "can sometimes lead to resentment among the permanent staff, who question why their hospital is willing to pay twice as much to agency nurses to fill open shifts as it pays to its own loyal staff."

Healthcare Vendor Management Systems ensure that the process for managing agency staff is simple and effective. Implementing such a system means that the same, if not less, effort than managing internal staff is required. In addition, nurses do not get paid 2x as much if they work for an agency. The mark up on pay rates to agency staff does not equate to being 2x the cost of internal staff (especially if you factor in other benefits for internal staff) and this money is not all paid to the nurse. Further, there is an implication in this statement that the mark up is unnecessary. The mark up exists to provide quality staff, often under short notice and goes to cover the business costs of properly recruiting, screening, hiring and placing these professionals.

The solution is to more effectively utilize staffing agencies - not work toward eliminating them. Attempting to eliminate agencies can actually end up being more costly to hospitals in the long run due to increased staff overtime, burnout/turnover and higher management costs due to a lack of efficient processes if/when using agency staff is necessary. Additionally, until the nursing shortage is over it's not feasible for every hospital to fully eliminate their agency usage. Therefore, a better goal is to focus on more effective agency management - not elimination.

In the past I've written about several reasons to use agency staff so I won't repeat myself here. I'll only close by saying that focusing on things such as improved orientation, better credential compliance management and process automation with a comprehensive workforce management system is a more effective solution for hospitals in regard to addressing their concerns with agency staff.

Unanimous Vote Creates Largest RN Union in U.S. History

This week saw the formation of the largest nursing union in the history of the U.S. The National Nurses United organizes over 150,000 nurses by uniting the California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee with the Massachusetts Nursing Association and some members of the United American Nurses. The goal of the new union is to influence healthcare reform and improve the quality of care through efforts such as extending California’s patient ratio law to other states.

Dec. 7, 2009 - To standing cheers, delegates to the founding convention of the National Nurses United (NNU) today unanimously endorsed the creation of the largest union and professional organization of registered nurses in U.S. history - and projected a major escalation in campaigns to expand union representation of nurses and an expanded voice in healthcare reform.

via www.nursezone.com

St. Vincents Medical Center Gets It Right With Their Video That's Going Viral

The video below is an exceptional example of a hospital using a catchy, fun video to promote their hospital. The video features the entire staff of St Vincent’s Medical Center in Portland, Oregon dancing in pink gloves for breast cancer awareness. I've personally known several women from family members, to friends, to co-workers that have all survived breast cancer so I found this video inspiring.

From a marketing perspective this video is perfect. This is exactly the kind of marketing that can go viral and really promote your hospital or healthcare staffing company. Interestingly, nothing is being sold here. There is no pitch, no "contact us today."

So what makes it great?

Basically, this video sends the message that the staff at St. Vincent's Medical Center in Portland are approachable, real people. From the healthcare professionals, to the lab techs, to the service employees, this video makes you feel that these people are fun, thoughtful and caring. It leaves the viewer with the impression that both the employees and the environment at the hospital are upbeat and inspiring. They make their sale without overtly selling anything.

If you're considering making a video to promote your company do yourself a favor and take some notes here. Kudos to the St. Vincent's Medical Center.

AMN Poll: Reform may worsen healthcare worker shortage

In partnership with The Council on Physician and Nurses Supply, AMN Healthcare released the results of a recently conducted poll of hospital CEOs suggesting that healthcare reform will exacerbate the shortage of healthcare professionals.

"While the short-term economic environment may have temporarily eased the ability to recruit and retain clinical staff, the long-term dynamics of an aging population will drive the need for thousands of additional healthcare professionals," Susan Nowakowski, president of AMN Healthcare, said. "Any plan to expand access to care would intensify an already anticipated critical shortage of clinicians."

Healthcare reform has been a big topic this year. How healthcare reform will affect the healthcare staffing industry remains to be seen. However, most people seem to think it will definitely have a positive impact on the healthcare staffing industry as the demand for healthcare staff increases.