Sentara recently said that it would raise the salaries of most of its employees. It will also provide reimbursement for adoptions and infertility care as well as increased paid time off, parental leave and other benefits. How does this play into your recruitment and retention strategy?
We will be short of 300,000 to 500,000 nurses nationwide by 2028. Add to that a shortage of about 500,000 other affiliated medical professionals and that’s a really scary thing about the staffing of 12 hospitals. and related clinics. We’ve strived to stay ahead of the pack in terms of salary, compensation and benefits design. To some extent, that has been very successful for us in stabilizing our workforce. Looking at how we create better workforce flexibility for our team members will become even more important to us in terms of how we think about change and how we think about it. combine skill sets with nurses’ preferred work areas. Then there’s the concept of getting people to practice at the highest level of license. It’s about devising new ways to deliver care—how we leverage other team members to help with care delivery and free those members to focus on their highest potential. We can also leverage technology to create a smoother, easier and more efficient workplace.
We also have to do a better job of creating a desire for people to jump into healthcare careers. That will force us to start engaging at the high school level and educate kids about the benefits of a healthcare career. We need to create career paths within our organizations and partner with others to help people develop their careers.
How do you facilitate practice at the top of the license?
There are some opportunities. One: How do we hone and continue to develop legislative and regulatory bodies that create more consistency to help us achieve top licensing across all different geographies that we serve? Second, it’s about leveraging technology. Unfortunately, our doctors will tell you that they spend an average of two hours documenting patient care and everything they did during the day. That’s a lot of time. The promise of electronic health records remains the same. But the way we build it today is sucking up a lot of those caregivers’ administrative time instead of letting them spend their cognitive time on patient care.
How are you addressing mental health needs between caregivers and patients?
Internally, we have created safe spaces where nurses can visit members of the behavioral health team in our facilities. That is a good first step. The statistics are terrible: 100,000 nurses nationwide under the age of 35 have left the field in the past two and a half years because of stress. There is much more to do there.
From the outside, the COVID-19 crisis has revealed long-simmering problems with inadequate access, diagnosis, and treatment of behavioral health problems. You see patients in crisis show up in our emergency departments and don’t stand a good chance of getting those patients into the right setting. It creates a deadlock in our ED, not ideal for treating behavioral health patients. We remodeled some of our EDs to create designated behavioral health spaces that allowed us to free up some staff. We’ve also started moving into outreach—think virtual care and try to reach people before they have a crisis.
In the long run, we will have to evolve into a public-private partnership. Those people will look at how we increase the number of behavioral health professionals in the market. Virtual care promises to create better accessibility.
We are also asking: Do we have to think differently about the continuum of care in relation to behavioral health and how can we make it more mainstream in our primary care practices? than? Behavioral health problems often go hand-in-hand with chronic care problems for many people, and if one goes untreated, the other will suffer. We consider it our responsibility to figure out how we can do better there.
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