Emotional and physical fatigue have contributed to a profound nursing shortage in hospitals across country. Now, many hospitals are trying to improve nursing morale, and in turn patient care, by creating programs that reinforce healthy habits and eliminate bad ones.
Drugmaker Cephalon is paying $444 million to settle long-running state and federal probes of its sales and marketing practices. Cephalon will also become the first drugmaker to be required under a corporate integrity agreement with the Department of Health and Human Services to publicly disclose its payments to physicians. The five-year integrity agreement says that by early 2010, the company "shall post in a prominent position on its website an easily accessible and readily searchable listing of all physicians" acting as speakers, training as speakers, or serving as consultants for the company during 2009. During the first quarter of 2011, Cephalon will have to disclose the doctors who received any payments from the company in the prior calendar year.
Finding doctors who know their patients well and who deliver informed medical care with efficiency and empathy has become quite a challenge: Primary care doctors spend far more time talking to patients and helping them avert health crises or cope with ailments that are chronic and incurable than they spend performing tests and procedures. According to this article in the New York Times, the problem is that in this era of managed care and reimbursements dictated by Medicare and other insurers, doctors don't get much compensation for talking to patients. Instead, they get paid primarily for procedures, from blood tests to surgery, and for the number of patients they see, the article contends.
Iraq will allow doctors to carry guns to protect themselves after hundreds have been targeted and killed since the 2003 U.S.-led invasion. The government also ordered the Health Ministry to begin building high security residential compounds around hospitals for physicians to live in. About 8,000 doctors fled Iraq since the 2003 war, and the moves appear to be a confidence-building measure to encourage doctors to come back and to provide them with protection from kidnap gangs that often target professionals.
We hear a lot about what hospitals should do to recruit and retain key employees, perhaps by looking at success stories outside the healthcare industry. Maybe we've got it backwards. Maybe those other industries should take their cues from healthcare.
Case in point: 14 hospitals made the 100 Best Companies 2008, an annual survey published in the current issue of Working Mother magazine. By far, hospitals present the largest delegation to the list.
"It's a very strong group," says Carol Evans, Working Mother CEO and president. "They all have a common thread, a culture that says that working mothers are extremely important to them. It's not just a program here or there or some funding, it is an organization saying ‘we welcome working mothers into our employee base' and that is a cultural shift when you value that talent."
It is a cultural shift born of necessity.
"First of all, hospitals employ huge numbers of women so they are very laser-focused on the issues of women to begin with," Evans says. "Point No. 2 is that hospitals are in a terrible war for talent. It's not just for nurses. It's for top technical, administrative, and financial talent. It's an interesting time."
None of this is breaking news to human resources folks, who've been dealing with these issues for years. But it does indicate the outside world's growing understanding of the severe personnel shortages and "interesting time" affecting the healthcare industry. In addition, it shows that the hospital industry—perhaps more than any other industry—understands the pressures on working women and is on the leading edge of finding solutions that allow employees to better balance family and work, to the benefit of everybody. Hospitals on the Working Mother list share common benefits packages that center around competitive pay, flexible hours, and, of course, childcare options.
H. Lee Moffitt Cancer Center & Research Institute in Tampa. FL, is on the Top 100 list. Yvette Tremonti, vice president for human resources at the 162-bed private, nonprofit hospital, says more than 80% of Moffitt's 3,600 employees are women. "Our benefits really emphasize not just working women but parents in general," Tremonti says.
"But when you look at those demographics, tailoring benefits to that particular group, you are going to have a high number of those women who are parents."
For Moffitt, it's not just about finding daycare for a toddler. The hospital's "Backup Care" program, for example, provides not only access to care for dependent children, but also provides care options for "sandwich generation" employees tending to infirmed parents, even if those parents live in other cities or states.
Moffitt, like many hospitals on the Working Mother list, has a number of nursing scholarship programs and tuition reimbursement programs as well.
Obviously, these benefits promote recruiting and retention. That's what they're designed to do. But, they also improve lives. Perhaps no other industry offers entry level employees—women and men—better opportunities to improve their lives, and enhance their training and income, while also filling vital roles for the enterprise. For that, hospitals should be justifiably proud.
John Commins is the human resources and community and rural hospitals editor with HealthLeaders Media. He can be reached at jcommins@healthleadersmedia.com.
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Lakewood Ranch Medical Center, near Bradenton, FL, has named Jim Wilson as its new CEO, effective Oct. 6. Wilson comes to Lakewood Ranch from Central Montgomery Medical Center in Lansdale, PA, where he has been CEO since 2007.