Partnering with temporary staffing agencies, providing employees with more flexibility and creating ways to expedite tasks are three approaches that leaders are employing to help with staffing shortages.
These three executives and surgeons recently joined the Becker’s Ambulatory Surgery Centers Podcast to share their view on the industry’s staffing problems and how they are dealing with them at their organization.
Note: Responses were lightly edited for clarity and length.
Isador Liberman, MD. Orthopedic Surgeon at Texas Back Institute (Plano): The reality today is that the employment workforce is mobile. We’re not getting beyond that. The post pandemic reality is that people want to work from home. If we want to maintain our current business profile, we have to be able to adapt to that. So we have taken steps to provide our employees with the ability to work from home and from the office. It’s pretty clear that they are not as productive at home as they are in the office, so that’s been a challenge for us as a group, but we’ve been able to work through that. The transient nature of the employee workforce, they’re just going after the higher paycheck. They’ll go from our practice to the practice next door, to the other practice next door and then eventually they come back to our practice again, because they see that it’s really not that much better. We just have to accept that fact, but we have to add something to the mix. What we’ve tried to add at the Texas Back Institute is more of a collegial, family related type approach to this, where we have events, we bring people together, we do things, so you’re building some camaraderie in the team. And over time we’re seeing a drop in that turnover rate.
Mahoua Ray, MD. CEO and Medical Director of Kansas Surgery Center (Overland Park): So there are two main parts of ASC staffing that is a problem all through the country. One is anesthesiology, or anesthesia staffing, and the second is RN staffing. For the anesthesiology shortage, there’s not much you can do. Most CRNAs are now doing locum work. So what we do is, since we have both pain and anesthesia, we have some of our anesthesiologists help out in the operating room. RN staffing was really difficult but it has gotten better. There are many small businesses that have opened for RN staffing. So we use a few companies out there that are able to supply us RN at the last minute. The other thing that we have done for RN shortage is that we have tried to hire more LPNs and medical assistants that can at least help expedite what an RN does. We have also tried to be good with our preoperative process so that the RN time is reduced in the pre-op. Just utilizing the staff that we have, giving them a lot of help so we can get by with fewer staff.
Nikhil Shetty, MD. COO of Midwest Interventional Spine Specialists (Munster, Ind.): Staffing and workforce challenges are a concern across healthcare, and speaking specifically of anesthesia services, anesthesia as a service line has been very difficult to obtain in the ASC setting as well as in the hospital. It’s harder and harder to get anesthesiologists or CRNAs to cover your cases. So we have turned to temp agencies and other independent contractors to provide those anesthesia services. A lot of my anesthesia colleagues have given up a portion of their pain practice and are now doing anesthesia because of the high demand. We’ve been able to shift and provide those anesthesia services by reaching out to those resources.
In the small business setting, there’s obviously a lot of office turnover and hiring our workforce is becoming more and more difficult and challenging, so we take it upon ourselves to educate, from a top down perspective, all of our clinical staff, our advanced practice providers, our medical assistants, our nursing staff and our front office staff that with us being a small practice, we’re able to kind of control that environment a little bit more, and it is more of a family. When we foster that relationship and sort of nurture them, because a lot of times they’re young, and we educate them as they grow into careers, and they advance into other careers, other aspects of their careers, we try and do everything that we can to retain that part of the workforce. As these transitions happen, as they naturally do, we establish a good training protocol so that as a person moves on to bigger and better things, part of their exit strategy is to help train the new person who’s going to assume that responsibility.
