Hospitals' acute need: Workers to fill jobs
UHS, Lourdes sweetening deals to attract candidates
CHUCK HAUPT / Press & Sun-Bulletin
Kim Hunter, a registered nurse at Binghamton General Hospital, prepares an IV. She worked as a nurse's aide while she earned her degree at Binghamton University's Decker School of Nursing on a UHS scholarship.
While the country faces the prospect of a looming recession, a large and growing demand for health care workers has spurred a new round of aggressive recruiting by local hospitals.
United Health Services -- Broome County's largest employer with 3,300 people on the payroll at Wilson Regional Medical Center and Binghamton General Hospital -- expects to fill 700 vacancies this year, said Michael McNally, UHS vice president of human resources.
Lourdes, a Binghamton hospital with about 2,200 employees, expects to hire between 400 and 450 people, said Dan Bonsick, the hospital's vice president of human resources.
Hospital administrators said they expect to fill the positions in the near term. But the task won't be easy. As the bulk of the professional work force nears retirement, the demand for health care workers is growing faster than the pool of candidates to fill the jobs.
"If we don't aggressively pursue the problem, it's not going to happen by itself," McNally said. "We could hire the entire graduating classes at BCC and BU and not satisfy our need."
The Decker School of Nursing at Binghamton University produced more than 200 nurses from its undergraduate program last year, with another 80 coming from Broome Community College's full- and part-time programs.
With intensified recruiting efforts, including tapping schools in Tompkins County and Mansfield Pa., staffing at Lourdes and UHS has grown between 15 and 25 percent over the last decade. But several factors are accelerating the need for help: an aging population, longer life expectancy, technological advances requiring more expertise, and an exodus of experienced workers nearing retirement age.
"We will see the crunch in the next three to five years," McNally said.
Demand remains especially high in technical fields, including pharmaceuticals, medical imaging and nursing.
Both UHS and Lourdes are sweetening the deal to draw qualified workers into the employment pipeline by increasing educational incentives, such as loan forgiveness and scholarships. This year, UHS expects to spend more than $1 million in educational and training programs designed to boost the supply of skilled workers in years to come.
Lourdes recently increased tuition reimbursement programs by 40 percent.
As part of the deal, both care providers require a commitment from recipients to work for them for a designated number of years.
The programs are part of a recruitment strategy known as "grow your own," McNally said. It's based on the idea that boosting educational incentives and certification programs and recruiting heavily from local and regional colleges is a more effective way to fill many nursing and technical positions than recruiting from afar.
Technology boom
While most private industries have to respond to global competition and the ebb and flow of any number of other economic pressures, health care faces a different set of issues.
"You can't really off-shore health care," Bonsick said. "People are going to be sick and they are going to be sick locally."
While that fact remains universal, demographic factors, changing technology, medical advancements and shifting public policy have combined to produce unexpected consequences.
"If somebody would have asked me 18 years ago if we would have seen (employee) growth of nearly 22 percent, I would have said no, that doesn't make sense," McNally said. In the 1980s, emphasis grew on using medical advances to keep people out of hospitals. That goal has been largely achieved, but overall staffing needs grew for many reasons:
* More technology means greater automation and fewer workers in most industries. But in health care, it means more skilled workers are needed to operate equipment. Medical imaging, for example, expanded from X-rays to scanning devices used more extensively to diagnose illnesses, each requiring experts to run tests and interpret results.
* Development of more drugs and their increasing use in treatment has dramatically increased the need for pharmacists.
* As people live longer, they tend to have greater risks and complications from chronic health problems. That means more people requiring more care. People who do end up in the hospital are sicker.
* A disproportionate number of experienced health care providers will retire within the next decade, while the overall Southern Tier population continues to age faster than the rest of the country.
"You can't talk about the status of the labor market without discussing the situation with baby boomers," Bonsick said,
Registered nurses 55 or older -- "in the retirement corridor" as McNally puts it -- will near 34 percent by 2010 at United Health Service. That's compared to 14 percent in 2005. The numbers are similar at Lourdes.
To fill the void, hospital administrators are recruiting people like Kim Hunter, 24, a Vestal native who worked as a nurse's aide while she earned her degree at Binghamton University's Decker School of Nursing on a UHS scholarship. She qualified for the Baccalaureate Accelerated Track program, which allowed her to build on her bachelor's degree in liberal arts from the University of Rochester to get a nursing degree in one year. For Hunter, it was an ideal time to get into health care.
''I really like patient care and I wanted all the work I could get," she said. "And you will always have a job here."
But finding enough people like Hunter will likely get harder before it gets easier, recruiters said.
There is a similar shortage of doctors, mainly because of restrictions placed on medical school admissions 20 years ago when policy-makers anticipated a glut in the profession.
In upstate New York, more than 52 percent of active physicians are 50 or older, according to the SUNY Center for Health Work Force Studies.
Unlike nurses and many technical specialists, there is no established local source for physicians, and national competition is fierce. That makes hospitals more dependent on recruiting internationally, said Nadene Bradburn, a Lourdes physician recruiter. That's a viable solution, she said, but it is complicated by visa and immigration issues.
Some fields are worse off than others, Bradburn said, noting the Tier suffers acutely from a lack of gastrointestinal physicians.
Psychiatrists, surgeons and urologists also are needed.
"Succession planning is pretty much our number-one priority," Bradburn said. "We certainly could use more GI doctors. It's the search that keeps me up at night."
Accordingly, the price for doctors goes up as the supply goes down. The median annual salary for internal medicine has risen 14 percent from 2002 to 2007 to $193,162, and compensation for gastroenterologists is up 30 percent to $356,388, according to the Medical Group Management Association's Physician Compen-sation and Productivity Survey.
Retaining workers is as vital as recruiting them, and that means providing a satisfying work environment, said Marjorie Cinti, a nurse recruiter with Lourdes. The emphasis has been on creating a workspace that allows nurses to spend more time with patients and less time with administrative and logistical duties, she said.
The hospital also is increasing education and equipment to avert injuries, which older staff members may be prone to because they tend to do heavy lifting.
"If caregivers are getting older and the patient population is getting larger, that's a bad combination," Bonsick said.
CHUCK HAUPT / Press & Sun-Bulletin
Kim Hunter, a registered nurse at Binghamton General Hospital, prepares an IV. She worked as a nurse's aide while she earned her degree at Binghamton University's Decker School of Nursing on a UHS scholarship.
While the country faces the prospect of a looming recession, a large and growing demand for health care workers has spurred a new round of aggressive recruiting by local hospitals.
United Health Services -- Broome County's largest employer with 3,300 people on the payroll at Wilson Regional Medical Center and Binghamton General Hospital -- expects to fill 700 vacancies this year, said Michael McNally, UHS vice president of human resources.
Lourdes, a Binghamton hospital with about 2,200 employees, expects to hire between 400 and 450 people, said Dan Bonsick, the hospital's vice president of human resources.
Hospital administrators said they expect to fill the positions in the near term. But the task won't be easy. As the bulk of the professional work force nears retirement, the demand for health care workers is growing faster than the pool of candidates to fill the jobs.
"If we don't aggressively pursue the problem, it's not going to happen by itself," McNally said. "We could hire the entire graduating classes at BCC and BU and not satisfy our need."
The Decker School of Nursing at Binghamton University produced more than 200 nurses from its undergraduate program last year, with another 80 coming from Broome Community College's full- and part-time programs.
With intensified recruiting efforts, including tapping schools in Tompkins County and Mansfield Pa., staffing at Lourdes and UHS has grown between 15 and 25 percent over the last decade. But several factors are accelerating the need for help: an aging population, longer life expectancy, technological advances requiring more expertise, and an exodus of experienced workers nearing retirement age.
"We will see the crunch in the next three to five years," McNally said.
Demand remains especially high in technical fields, including pharmaceuticals, medical imaging and nursing.
Both UHS and Lourdes are sweetening the deal to draw qualified workers into the employment pipeline by increasing educational incentives, such as loan forgiveness and scholarships. This year, UHS expects to spend more than $1 million in educational and training programs designed to boost the supply of skilled workers in years to come.
Lourdes recently increased tuition reimbursement programs by 40 percent.
As part of the deal, both care providers require a commitment from recipients to work for them for a designated number of years.
The programs are part of a recruitment strategy known as "grow your own," McNally said. It's based on the idea that boosting educational incentives and certification programs and recruiting heavily from local and regional colleges is a more effective way to fill many nursing and technical positions than recruiting from afar.
Technology boom
While most private industries have to respond to global competition and the ebb and flow of any number of other economic pressures, health care faces a different set of issues.
"You can't really off-shore health care," Bonsick said. "People are going to be sick and they are going to be sick locally."
While that fact remains universal, demographic factors, changing technology, medical advancements and shifting public policy have combined to produce unexpected consequences.
"If somebody would have asked me 18 years ago if we would have seen (employee) growth of nearly 22 percent, I would have said no, that doesn't make sense," McNally said. In the 1980s, emphasis grew on using medical advances to keep people out of hospitals. That goal has been largely achieved, but overall staffing needs grew for many reasons:
* More technology means greater automation and fewer workers in most industries. But in health care, it means more skilled workers are needed to operate equipment. Medical imaging, for example, expanded from X-rays to scanning devices used more extensively to diagnose illnesses, each requiring experts to run tests and interpret results.
* Development of more drugs and their increasing use in treatment has dramatically increased the need for pharmacists.
* As people live longer, they tend to have greater risks and complications from chronic health problems. That means more people requiring more care. People who do end up in the hospital are sicker.
* A disproportionate number of experienced health care providers will retire within the next decade, while the overall Southern Tier population continues to age faster than the rest of the country.
"You can't talk about the status of the labor market without discussing the situation with baby boomers," Bonsick said,
Registered nurses 55 or older -- "in the retirement corridor" as McNally puts it -- will near 34 percent by 2010 at United Health Service. That's compared to 14 percent in 2005. The numbers are similar at Lourdes.
To fill the void, hospital administrators are recruiting people like Kim Hunter, 24, a Vestal native who worked as a nurse's aide while she earned her degree at Binghamton University's Decker School of Nursing on a UHS scholarship. She qualified for the Baccalaureate Accelerated Track program, which allowed her to build on her bachelor's degree in liberal arts from the University of Rochester to get a nursing degree in one year. For Hunter, it was an ideal time to get into health care.
''I really like patient care and I wanted all the work I could get," she said. "And you will always have a job here."
But finding enough people like Hunter will likely get harder before it gets easier, recruiters said.
There is a similar shortage of doctors, mainly because of restrictions placed on medical school admissions 20 years ago when policy-makers anticipated a glut in the profession.
In upstate New York, more than 52 percent of active physicians are 50 or older, according to the SUNY Center for Health Work Force Studies.
Unlike nurses and many technical specialists, there is no established local source for physicians, and national competition is fierce. That makes hospitals more dependent on recruiting internationally, said Nadene Bradburn, a Lourdes physician recruiter. That's a viable solution, she said, but it is complicated by visa and immigration issues.
Some fields are worse off than others, Bradburn said, noting the Tier suffers acutely from a lack of gastrointestinal physicians.
Psychiatrists, surgeons and urologists also are needed.
"Succession planning is pretty much our number-one priority," Bradburn said. "We certainly could use more GI doctors. It's the search that keeps me up at night."
Accordingly, the price for doctors goes up as the supply goes down. The median annual salary for internal medicine has risen 14 percent from 2002 to 2007 to $193,162, and compensation for gastroenterologists is up 30 percent to $356,388, according to the Medical Group Management Association's Physician Compen-sation and Productivity Survey.
Retaining workers is as vital as recruiting them, and that means providing a satisfying work environment, said Marjorie Cinti, a nurse recruiter with Lourdes. The emphasis has been on creating a workspace that allows nurses to spend more time with patients and less time with administrative and logistical duties, she said.
The hospital also is increasing education and equipment to avert injuries, which older staff members may be prone to because they tend to do heavy lifting.
"If caregivers are getting older and the patient population is getting larger, that's a bad combination," Bonsick said.
Labels: employment, New York, nursing, United Health Services
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