The demand for talent is soaring everywhere, but particularly in healthcare, where the demand for both primary care and specialty providers as well as ancillaries is high and getting worse. Estimates suggest we will be short an estimated 48,000 providers within the next few years.
If you’re worried about these trends, you’re not alone. Health systems with large full-time recruiting teams are struggling to find talent. They’re doing this right alongside their community health counterparts, and many times, the two entities are competing.
If you’ve been struggling to fill staff vacancies at your FQHC, but you’ve always handled recruiting on your own, this may be the year to consider a staffing partnership.
Healthcare and the Impact of the Great Resignation
It’s not that clinical and administrative staffers aren’t willing to leave their current positions. If the Great Resignation is any indicator, employees are job jumping in record numbers. The trick for you is to catch these candidates proactively and inform them on why jumping to your organization (and not somewhere else) could be so satisfying.
It’s been about a year since a psychologist at Texas A&M created the phrase, but the Great Resignation is still here, and it’s not slowing down; there were another four million resignations in February 2022. It was the ninth consecutive month for these kinds of numbers. Fortune quoted the Texas A&M professor saying, “workers are also contending with burnout after two years of higher-stress work.” Burnout, as we all know, has been healthcare’s middle name since COVID first hit.
That level of industry-wide burnout inevitably correlates with a plethora of resignations across the field. The healthcare industry is experiencing the second-highest number of resignations since this staffing crisis began—second only to the hospitality industry.
Where does that leave you in your efforts to attract talent?
Why a Staffing Agency—Now?
Health Leaders Media looked at the impact of the Great Resignation on healthcare and found that we’ve lost roughly 20% of our workforce over the past two years, including 30% of our nursing teams. Healthcare IT Today reports, “Employment in healthcare is facing the biggest challenges it has ever faced.”
Where does this leave you, the community healthcare executive who has always taken on the recruiting function as an add-on to your regular job? Recruiting in healthcare, particularly in the FQHC space, is incredibly hard now. We know it was never easy when competing against the higher salaries offered by your health system competitors. Today, the job is seen or actually is a more-than 40-hour-a-week undertaking.
This is a time for new partnerships. The longer a seat sits empty on your particular bus, the more pressure you put on your staff, who may already be struggling to recover from the pandemic, and the more the revenue lost and the lower the patient satisfaction. UHC Solutions offers a helping hand to community healthcare organizations when they need executive and clinical placements. Please call on us. We’ve been building our talent pools for years and can help you fill vacancies faster.
