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Front Page » Top Stories » Hospitals use lures to beat nursing shortage

Hospitals use lures to beat nursing shortage

Written by on June 28, 2022
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Hospitals use lures to beat nursing shortage

Hospitals in Florida are employing several strategies to both retain their nurses and recruit more to mitigate the ongoing shortage that is straining the healthcare profession.

These incentives include sign-on bonuses, significant increases in their base salary and an evaluation of their workplace environment, which looks at ways to maximize the overall team that supports care at the bedside within the hospital, leverage technology to reduce administrative burdens on nurses and other staff, and efforts to look at career pathways to encourage nursing assistants or nurse technicians to become registered nurses, said Mary Mayhew, president and CEO of the Florida Hospital Association.

“Unfortunately, since the pandemic, there has been a much greater dependency on contracted staffing – traveler nurses – far greater than prior to the pandemic, and it hasn’t really decreased as much as hospitals would like it to,” she said. “Those individuals are not necessarily coming from out-of-state; they may be nurses that live in the area who are under contract with a staffing agency.”

Staffing agencies have been paying their contracted nurses extremely high wages, she added, “well beyond what is sustainable, in terms of what hospitals are ultimately able to pay.”

As hospitals nationwide are still experiencing great nursing shortages, from 2020 to 2021 there has been an increase of about 25% in staffing costs, Ms. Mayhew said. “Hospitals depend on reimbursements from Medicare, Medicaid, and other commercial health insurance companies to cover the cost of care. They are not receiving a 25% increase in their reimbursement rates from any of these companies or government programs to cover the increase in cost of staffing. So, it’s been difficult for hospitals to compete with those staffing agencies to hire and retain staff.”

According to the Florida Nurse Workforce Projections from 2019 to 2035 by the Florida Hospital Association and the Safety Net Hospital Alliance of Florida, published last July, between those years nursing demand is projected to increase by 76,600, a 31% increase for registered nurses and 20,200, or a 40% increase, for licensed nurse practitioners.

“This growth is driven in part by projected population growth of 21%,” said the report. “Population aging also increases demand for nurses, with the population ages between 65 and 74 projected to increase by 32%, and the population ages 75 and older projected to increase by 74% over the projection period.”

In 2035, the supply of nurses is projected to only meet 88% of the demand for RNs and 70% of the demand for LPNs.

Increasing the pipeline of new nursing graduates and working with the university system and the community colleges to expand their capacity to accept applicants to the nursing programs, she said, is necessary, but it will not be a short-term fix.

“With really no end in sight, we remained concerned about the ability to retain and recruit in all of our hospitals the necessary staff to support timely access to healthcare services,” said Ms. Mayhew, as turnover rate remains about 25% among nurses. “Nurses are retiring earlier, some are leaving healthcare altogether; others are pursuing those very lucrative opportunities with staffing agencies, and all of it combined is leading to a very severe staffing shortage.”

One Response to Hospitals use lures to beat nursing shortage

  1. Rachel

    July 20, 2022 at 8:50 pm

    This problem was worsened by those organizations who felt LPN’s and ADN nurses weren’t qualified enough. They started trying to hire BSN nurses only….or hire ADN nurses with caveats to enroll in their BSN. We cannot possibly churn out enough BSN nurses to cover the shortage and an ADN RN can do everything a BSN can do for a degree that costs about 10K. Start there.

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