By 2025, the United States healthcare sector will face a shortage of more than 650,000 medical practitioners. Also, more than half of the healthcare workers in the United States have reported burnout symptoms which include anxiety, insomnia, depression, etc. Healthcare staffing shortage has been a major contributor to staff burnout in the healthcare industry. The persistent problem of staff burnout in healthcare institutions has a solution: Travel Nurses. These professionals provide an effective way for hospitals to overcome this issue.
Travel nurses are medical professionals who work on temporary assignments or contracts across different hospitals. Usually, they are Registered Nurses (RNs) who serve as temporary employees in healthcare facilities such as clinics, hospitals, and nursing homes. In this blog, we take a look at how organizations can utilize Travel Nurses to overcome some of the current staffing challenges in the healthcare industry.
How Hiring Travel Nurses can Mitigate Burnout Among Healthcare Staff
- Flexibility: Medical professionals, primarily nurses, are leaving the healthcare sector after serving rigorously as the frontline defenders during the pandemic. Since travel nurses work on temporary projects and for limited time periods compared to full-time healthcare professionals, travel nurses have greater flexibility with their work schedule and can serve better in future public emergencies.
- Diverse Work Experience: Travel Nurses have experience working in diverse and agile work environments, they can induce different skills and experiences in the organizations’ healthcare system, which can help fill cross-functional nursing roles and improve patient outcomes.
- Ready Availability: As travel nurses have a short-term and flexible work schedule, they are readily available in the job market as compared to full-time nurses. With the pressure that COVID-19 exerted on the country’s healthcare system, travel nurses are an ideal possibility to serve as frontline defenders in future healthcare crises in terms of availability.
- Valuable Frontline Insights: In a McKinsey survey, 31% of participant nurses indicated that they were likely to leave their current role by next year in direct patient care. Furthermore, nurses cited workplace satisfaction as a crucial factor in their decision to remain in their present roles. As travel nurses can fill multiple nursing positions, they provide a valuable opportunity for healthcare organizations to get feedback from frontline workers on how to improve the workplace. Their valuable insights can help hospitals strengthen employee retention and reduce staff burnout.
How to Hire Travel Nurses
- Partnering with Nursing Schools: Hospitals can establish connections with medical training facilities where they can positively contribute towards better formal education and strengthen healthcare infrastructure to ensure an ample supply of qualified nurses in the job market.
- Industry Connections: Hospitals can connect with distinct industry partners. The partners may include counterpart healthcare facilities, training institutions, employment agencies, former employees, etc., to get candidate referrals and fill their open positions.
- Job Boards and Social Media: Utilizing networking platforms and niche job boards, healthcare facilities can source and hire best-fit candidates for their open nursing positions.
- Partnering with a Staffing Agency: A staffing agency is another possibility for finding candidates for open nursing positions. They have well-established industry connections, recruitment resources, and tools in place and are well-informed on the compliance and regulatory requirements of the industry, offering personalized and quality services to their clients in the healthcare industry. Also, partnering with staffing agencies is cost-efficient, they help to reduce sourcing, onboarding, and other hiring-related costs.
In summary, staff burnout is an imminent challenge that hospitals face today and in the future as well. If it is not addressed adequately, it can result in a public healthcare crisis like the one we experienced during the COVID-19 pandemic. Travel Nurses will play a pivotal role in addressing this challenge. In addition to the strategies discussed above for hiring Travel Nurses, organizations should incorporate appropriate hiring practices and strategies to fill open healthcare positions, given the criticality of the industry.
iQuasar has helped numerous organizations to fill challenging healthcare positions with highly qualified and experienced healthcare personnel. We have more than 19 years of experience working across different healthcare industry verticals, which has helped us develop strong industry connections to hire the best-fit candidates for your open roles. Furthermore, our experienced and skilled recruiters can help you fill your open positions in a fast turnaround time. Moreover, we are well-informed about the changing industry dynamics and devise hiring strategies accordingly, helping us to provide quality services to our clients. As healthcare facilities face challenges with employee retention, we have a resume database of more than one million to build a strong pipeline of qualified candidates to overcome this roadblock and reduce burnout.
