News: The Great Resignation’s effect on quality of care, workforce retention

This article was adapted from a three-part series about the “Great Resignation from the healthcare CFO perspective” published by HealthLeaders.

One of the biggest hopes of healthcare executives is that COVID-19 case numbers and hospitalizations will continue their current decline, enabling countless burnt-out healthcare workers to get desperately needed breaks from long hours, constant stress, and grueling job demands.

Those factors are said to be the primary reasons for the mass exodus of healthcare workers who have left their jobs, and in some cases, the field of medicine entirely.

For each hospital or healthcare system, this workforce trend has greatly increased the number of open job requisitions at organizations. In turn, it has meant spending more money on recruiting, training, and compensation programs to maintain staffing levels, and ensuring that quality of care is retained.

Even if a hospital has been able to hire traveling workers to maintain staffing levels, the quality of care may not be the same as that previously provided by dedicated, in-house staff, says Gail Gazelle, MD, assistant professor of medicine at Harvard University in Massachusetts and a master-certified coach for physicians .  

While traveling nurse positions generally afford higher pay, these nurses often work in communities they have no personal ties to, she says.

"When we don't have a committed, dedicated workforce, it makes it difficult for the whole healthcare system to thrive," Gazelle says. "If you think for a moment about a physician in a busy emergency room, where they've lost some of their regular nurses and now they're having to work with traveling nurses, those new nurses probably aren't familiar with the needs of that particular population. It's quite disruptive. It makes it difficult for the advanced emergency physician to provide good care to vulnerable individuals."

And many hospitals simply can't get by with traveling replacements, and the staffing shortage is forcing them to get creative, says Terry Lutz, CFO at Scheurer Hospital in Pigeon, Michigan.

"We have had to keep patients in the emergency room since our staffing and volume in acute care didn't allow for the internal transfer," Lutz explains. "We haven't been able to transfer some patients to larger tertiary hospitals, since their staffing shortages resulted in beds not being available. It has resulted in some innovation on our part, in conjunction with a larger facility, where we initiated telehealth in the inpatient unit to access specialists needed to care for patients."

Editor’s note: This article was originally published by HealthLeaders. This is part two of a three-part series about the Great Resignation from the healthcare CFO perspective. Read part one here.