To get ahead of staffing challenges, hospitals should look to their own communities, according to Carl Hinkson, senior director of ancillary services at Everett, Wash.-based Providence Health & Services.
Mr. Hinkson spoke with Becker's about the challenges he's anticipating in 2024 and how he leverages local resources to address one of the healthcare industry's biggest challenges.
Note: This conversation was edited for clarity.
Question: What are you most looking forward to in 2024 and what are your top priorities?
Carl Hinkson: I have oversight over diagnostic imaging, respiratory therapy, acute rehab therapies, and my No. 1 goal is to work on recovery in the workforce. The great resignation has kind of challenged a lot of some of our capacities. So recovering the workforce would allow us to better meet the patients' needs.
Q: What have been some of the tougher roles to staff where you are?
CH: Some of the more difficult positions to fill would be respiratory therapist and anything to do with sonography.
Q: Why is that and what is your strategy to recruit and retain?
CH: The reason I think that has happened is with the great resignations, when we looked at COVID-19, we saw people retire in greater numbers than previous years. Then the schools were challenged for their enrollment. So when you think about a field such as respiratory therapy, we know that we have to have about 7,000 graduates coming out of the colleges just to meet normal attrition during the years of COVID-19. That number dropped off to around 5,000 per year, and so that created a gap in the numbers of available people to hire.
Then you have normal increases in need for healthcare, and that creates some challenges. Travelers emerged, and caregivers saw the money there and left to go seek that high value dollar, and it made it more difficult for those of us who are working operationally in the hospital to recover those positions. The strategies we would use are looking at evaluating kind of like how we can build a pipeline working collaboratively with the colleges, but also looking at some of those lower level positions, and can we identify good candidates and advocate for them to apply to schools. But mostly we're looking at ways that we can evaluate the talent pipeline as a whole and working with our colleges to kind of build up their programs.
Q: Do you have any advice for other hospitals and health systems who might be in a similar position as you guys?
CH: The short gap measure is looking at your agency pool and if there is the ability to get agency short time. And then you have to evaluate what services you are doing right now and if it is value added, and it's different for everybody. If you look at some of the challenges we've had here locally, we evaluated some of our capacity, and we had a real challenge with one of our scanners here in Everett having a lot of being sort of a stop bottleneck for the community. And we worked with our other partners in the community to expand their services so they could relieve some of the pressure. And then working with the high schools. I was trying to build a partnership with HOSA, the Health Occupations Students of America, and the best way to think of it is like Future Farmers of America, except for healthcare professionals. They're in all 50 states. Washington state here has a local chapter. And this is an opportunity to go meet with high school students, and plant the seeds of some interesting professions in healthcare that you can think about going into. So students in high school are exposed to more than just nursing and doctors in healthcare. There's respiratory therapists, physical therapists, occupational therapists, speech language pathologists.
So work on some of those relationships in the community to kind of help expand awareness, and try and rebuild that talent pipeline.
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