The persistent staffing shortages of the past few years, exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic and the Great Resignation, are forcing hospital and health systems leaders to rethink their workforce models and strategies for attracting and retaining clinicians, including float pool nurses.
During Becker’s 13th Annual CEO + CFO Roundtable, at an executive roundtable sponsored by ShiftKey, Mike Vitek, chief executive officer at ShiftKey, led a discussion with healthcare leaders from across the country about what a future-proof sustainable workforce model looks like.
Four key takeaways were:
- Healthcare delivery and sustainability are being tested by persistent workforce crises. By 2029, 1.6 million nurses intend to leave the field, creating a huge gap in the nursing workforce. At the same time, continuing contracts for travel nurses are stretching hospital budgets. These contracts, which pay travel nurses higher rates while allowing them to choose or decline shifts, often breed resentment among full-time staff.
- Organizations have tried different methods to address staff discontent with travel contracts, with little success. These methods include raising pay rates for extra shifts, invoking the need to lower nurse-to-patient ratios and even suggesting that not bringing in travel nurses would increase patient suffering. However, staff nurses typically see through those attempts.
“The question now isn’t just how we fill shifts, but how we model something that will last going forward,” Mr. Vitek said. He defined a future-proof workforce model as one that gives flexibility to clinicians, visibility to leaders and stable care to patients.
One roundtable participant said her organization recognizes the need for flexibility and now asks staff nurses how they prefer to structure their shifts. “It’s about having up-front conversations about what’s valuable to them.”
- Another approach to workforce flexibility is building a reliable internal float pool — but conventional approaches typically fall short. One participant recounted several disappointing experiences when managing per diem nurses who form part of his health system’s float pool, who signed up for shifts but then didn’t show up. Yet, when the HR team tried to do thorough vetting of float pool nurses, the process took so long that by time the new person was onboarded, the organization was over the peak demand that necessitated their hiring.
- ShiftKey’s platform enables flexible shift-picking for nurses and reliability for organizations. The key to making shift scheduling work is providing flexibility in exchange for digitally traceable commitment. “If you give me pliability in my schedule, I will give you transparency and I’ll show up, I’ll be reliable,” Mr. Vitek said, illustrating the reasoning behind nurses’ use of the platform.
He also noted that ShiftKey’s platform is adaptable to any type or size of health system that is looking to onboard float pool nurses because its design and functionality are equally user-friendly.
“Folks become more comfortable working with us when they understand that we work just as well in dense urban areas as we do in rural areas and we can help the whole system [when it has locations in both urban and rural areas],” he said.
