We’re now solidly into the new year, yet many of the issues facing employers echo what we’ve seen before. And after a full year spent documenting those challenges on a weekly basis, we understand better than most how to address and potentially solve them. With that in mind, please join us for a quick look back at the top CareerStaff Healthcare Staffing Blog posts from 2022.
The Best Healthcare Staffing Blog Posts of 2022: The Staffing Crisis
Many of the emerging healthcare trends for 2023, like the ongoing extension of the clinical setting and the evolution of third-party billing services, are only being exacerbated by the ongoing nationwide shortage of workers. Retaining and hiring new employees continues to create significant operational difficulties — yet there are also more than a few solutions that employers can utilize to offset them.
February: How the Nurse Staffing Shortage Is Impacting Patient Care
From the earliest weeks of 2022, it was apparent that the nurse shortage triggered by the pandemic was going to get worse before it got better. Today, with the newly passed omnibus bill set to provide the industry with billions in funding, we may be about to finally see some relief. In the short term, though, this post from February can help employers better understand the reasons for the shortage, and immediate solutions to be taken to offset it.
Burnout is always a risk in the nursing profession. This can lead to critical errors in patient care. And the shortage actually makes the situation worse, ‘driving many nurses to leave the profession’
> Read: How the Nurse Staffing Shortage Is Impacting Patient Care
July: How to Meet Workforce Challenges with Vendor Management
A few months later, we dove deeper into the ongoing staffing shortages facing employers and explored some potential solutions. For instance, with the help of a vendor management system (VMS), organizations that provide patient care can streamline many onerous and error-prone aspects of workforce management, like billing, invoicing, scheduling, and ensuring regulatory compliance.
By freeing on-site staff from time-consuming duties related to billing and invoicing, for instance, employers can get far more productivity from their current staff.
> Read: How VMS Help Employers Meet Workforce Challenges
August: 4 Strategies to Beat the Healthcare Staffing Crisis
Some other strategies for staying on top of the staffing crisis include working to achieve a more positive culture, rethinking employee benefits, and putting longer-term strategic solutions in place, along with one more, as we learned in this follow-up article.
Offering attractive benefits could still be cost prohibitive for many healthcare organizations. One effective alternate solution could be supplementing full-time staff with contracted workers for set periods of time, with the help of a healthcare staffing service.
> Read: 4 Strategies to Beat the Healthcare Staffing Crisis
September: Why Clinical Professional Development Matters
Employers looking to offset the shortage of clinical workers also have the option of offering a richer variety of opportunities for clinical professional development. Doing so can help reduce turnover, curb burnout and compassion fatigue, and provide nurses and clinicians with a richer sense of career satisfaction, among other benefits.
Professional development of this clinical workforce is now urgent for a number of reasons — to help ensure that every team member is operating at the top of their capacity, and to help prevent further dissatisfaction that leads to renewed turnover.
> Read: Why Clinical Professional Development Matters for Employers
October: How to Increase Employee Retention in Healthcare
With turnover at an alarmingly high rate throughout 2022, some experts began advocating for solutions based on a re-assessment of leadership strategies. We took a deeper dive into that discussion with this look at the role leadership plays when tackling the all-important job of increasing employee retention in healthcare and the leadership styles that may be best suited to the job.
When it comes to figuring out how to increase employee retention in healthcare, the transformational model seems to best fit the bill with its emphasis on culture and the wellbeing of workers.
> Read: How to Increase Employee Retention in Healthcare
December: How to Support the Mental Health of Clinical Workers
Another way to improve employee retention is by taking steps to look out for the mental health and well-being of the healthcare professionals working hard to provide care for patients and residents, day in and day out. From ensuring protection and safety to treating essential workers like they’re, well, essential, here are five methods of doing just that.
Offering flexible scheduling and as much paid leave as possible aren’t always easy options — but they’re both effective ways to keep workers happy.
> Read: 5 Ways to Support the Mental Health of Nurses & Clinical Workers
More Healthcare Staffing Blog Posts You May Have Missed in 2022
Dominant as it has been, the staffing shortage wasn’t the only challenge facing employers in 2022. Throughout the year, we monitored the industry’s top trends and commentary from healthcare thought leadership to offer the content needed to help leaders best meet the challenges facing them — here are some of the most noteworthy.
January: Cybersecurity Lessons for Healthcare Leaders
Healthcare data is among the most frequently targeted by hackers, and over the past years they’ve ramped up their attacks in a series of alarming security breaches. But what’s fueling this war on healthcare data, what should leaders know about their cybersecurity obligations, and how to meet them? We explored the challenge of healthcare data security in detail in this blog post from 2022.
Because of the value of the data, attacks on healthcare providers aren’t limited to larger entities, like in some other industries. Organizations of all sizes are at risk — the smaller ones perhaps more so, given that they may seem easier targets for hackers.
> Read: 4 Key Cybersecurity Lessons for Healthcare Leaders
April: Strategies for Improving the Patient Experience
From closer coordination of arrivals and discharges to creating a more uniform reporting structure for better transitions, here’s a rundown of strategies that healthcare leaders can use to improve the patient experience within the facilities they oversee.
The more time a nurse spends with their patients, the higher the patients will rate the quality of treatment and patient satisfaction.
> Read: Strategies for Improving the Patient Experience
August: How to Avoid Toxic Personalities in the Workplace
A single toxic attitude can impact an entire department or even a facility. And because creating a positive corporate culture was never a higher priority for healthcare employers than in 2022, we responded with a few strategies to help weed out bullies and other toxic personalities in the workplace.
Few people would admit to being a bully. But a thorough look at their background can help enlighten you
> Read: How to Avoid Toxic Personalities in the Workplace
October: Crisis Management Strategies for Healthcare Leaders
The pandemic was a true shock to the system for the healthcare industry — and one that’s had important lessons to offer. From making sure you’ve got an up-to-date disaster plan to cultivating a company-wide culture of crisis preparation, here are four ways to help ensure that you’re as prepared as possible for the next unforeseen event.
Although it may be impossible to fully plan for unforeseen events, it is possible to hone the skills that will be called upon in those situations.
> Read: 4 Crisis Management Strategies for Healthcare Leaders
> Related: Important Lessons from the Pandemic for Healthcare Leaders
November: Healthcare Workforce MSP Onboarding Checklist
Many organizations today leverage healthcare managed services (MSPs) to improve and optimize their workforce efficiency. But choosing the right partner can be difficult. How can leaders be sure that a company will take the necessary steps to meet its unique needs? With this MSP onboarding checklist, you’ll have some specific questions to ask to make sure any potential partner is up to the task.
Instead of being presented with a single option — or just a few — you should be offered a spectrum of solutions to best utilize your resources while expanding your capabilities.
> Read: Healthcare Workforce MSP Onboarding Checklist
> Looking to streamline your billing or other administrative services? Discover how managed service programs (MSPs) can help
December: Preparing for the Future of Post-Acute Care
From higher-acuity patients to a higher prevalence of worker burnout, preparing for the future of post-acute care requires addressing some longstanding challenges — and we’ve got a few key insights into doing just that in this look at the future that’s facing PAC providers.
By streamlining tasks related to hiring, billing and scheduling, healthcare organizations can accomplish much more with far fewer workers.
> Read: Preparing for the Future of Post-Acute Care
Keep on Top of What Matters with the Industry’s Best Healthcare Staffing Blog
Remember, we’ve got regular updates here at the CareerStaff Healthcare Staffing Blog, so stay tuned for more insights in the future! And if you’re looking for workforce solutions, you’ve come to the right place. Joint Commission Certified and an official Great Place to Work®, CareerStaff Unlimited is the nation’s top choice for healthcare workforce management solutions for good reason.
Known for the quality of our corporate culture and decades of collective experience, CareerStaff has the deep bench of insights, actionable data and technological tools that employers need to meet the current staffing crisis, and much more. Contact us here to learn more about how we can help you achieve your workforce management and patient care goals, or get the ball rolling by requesting staff now.