The AHA has released the fourth section of its workforce strategies guide, which is designed to help hospital and health system leaders navigate workforce challenges and opportunities. It focuses on hiring veterans, professional governance models, and academic-practice partnerships.
The guide was informed by the AHA Board of Trustees’ Task Force on Workforce and includes strategies, resources, and case studies from hospitals and health systems across the country.
Section 1 offered strategies and resources to support workforce wellbeing and behavioral health and prevent workplace violence. Section 2 focused on data and analytics, as well as technological supports. Section 3 focused on recruitment and retention, diversity and inclusion, and creative staffing models.
View AHA’s workforce webpage to download the all four sections of the guide, as well as additional resources.
In March 2023, the American Nurses Association and American Organization for Nursing Leadership — in partnership with Healthcare Solutions Group and Joslin Insight — released a study to “probe and validate the current demand for change, the support of various roles and programs, and the gap between leadership and the frontline.”
The Models of Care Insight Study Survey takes into account feedback from 50 in-depth interviews with top national healthcare leaders. The survey itself garnered 3,385 responses from professionals across the country. Specific audiences included “direct care nurses, nursing leadership, and other healthcare executives in acute care and ambulatory settings.”
These approaches work in tandem with broader workforce development efforts, and allow healthcare professionals to provide safe, high-quality, and empowered care.
Workforce vacancies across the healthcare continuum are straining bed availability and creating capacity bottlenecks, leading providers to implement new and innovative strategies that can help maximize the talents of their caregivers. These approaches work in tandem with broader workforce development efforts, and allow healthcare professionals to provide safe, high-quality, and empowered care.
As the volume of these strategies continues to grow, MHA’s Continuum of Care Council created this compendium to document both short- and long-term strategies and care models that may aid in patient care during this crisis and beyond.
While the compendium is not exhaustive, it pulls from the latest trends to showcase strategies that fit a range of settings and resource capabilities. Each strategy and care model has a brief description, linked resources to learn more, and surface barriers to implementation. MHA will also use this listing to guide our advocacy efforts to increase access to care and to empower the workers who make care possible
In alignment with AONL’s strategic initiatives, the AONL Workforce Committee and subcommittees identified best practices and innovations to help strategize and manage the complexities of the nursing workforce. The goal of the AONL Workforce Compendium is to bring these best practices and innovations together to be shared widely, to support and empower nurse leaders in attaining, retaining, and sustaining environments where nurses want to work and feel like they belong.
Violence against health care workers continues to rise across the country. As health care leaders and caregivers in Massachusetts noted increasing incidents of violence across their care settings, the Massachusetts Health & Hospital Association (MHA), Burlington, led the creation of the Healthcare Safety & Violence Prevention Workgroup (HSVPW) in 2017.
The comprehensive and progressive work of the HSVPW has led the way across the commonwealth and beyond to offer guidance on developing violence prevention programs.
A new report shows that that employer demand far exceeds the supply of workers in six key nursing and allied health fields, which will have “substantial and unsustainable consequences” for the state’s healthcare sector and economic opportunity.
The six target occupations featured in the report are: licensed practical nurses, associate degree registered nurses, medical/clinical laboratory technicians, respiratory therapists, surgical technologists, and radiologic technologists/radiographers.
While the shortage of workers grows, so has the desire of students to enter the healthcare field; the number of qualified students seeking education for these occupations from Massachusetts community colleges exceeds expected programmatic capacity by at least two to one, according to the report. Community college programs for the six occupations currently draw about 4,500 applicants, but they only have the capacity to enroll around 2,200 students.
The imbalance is most severe for radiological technologists, where programs have five qualified applicants for each available seat. Also of concern, large geographic gaps in education capacity exacerbate the workforce shortage in some parts of the state, the report found.
While the report acknowledges the current, ongoing efforts to build the workforce, it concludes that more action is needed. Specifically, the report calls for increasing the number of clinical placements and clinical educators by, among other things:
Addressing faculty compensation;
Creating a state regulatory environment supportive of expanding nurse education capacity; and
Developing “longitudinal data systems” to follow students through education, licensing, and into the workforce.
The report data was collected from surveys of certificate and degree programs associated with the six target occupations, as well as surveys of human resources leaders from acute care hospitals and long-term care providers, supplemented by data collected from federal and state sources.
“These nursing and allied health professionals are vital members of both acute and post-acute care teams, and essential to hospital operations,” said Kim Stevenson, MHA’s director of workforce and clinical affairs. “The joint report gives us a first-of-its-kind look at the gaps and the barriers in creating these positions, and recommendations for how we can work collectively to find solutions to bring better balance to the supply and demand for caregivers.”
Educators and providers identified three key obstacles to expanding enrollment to meet student demand: insufficient clinical placements, faculty and program leadership shortages, and state regulatory barriers for nursing
The inability to educate and train the next generation of healthcare workers is leading to three troubling developments, according to the report:
First, “In occupations facing severe labor shortages, persistent turnover creates a costly cycle that undermines the quality, accessibility, and affordability of care.”
That leads to the second problem – the high cost of temporary labor. “Survey respondents for both acute and long-term care organizations reported a combined $232 million in annual spending on temporary agency staff,” the report notes. “Extrapolating from these figures to all Massachusetts employers, the actual agency spend for these six occupations alone likely exceeds $450 million.”
Finally, the critical shortages of key healthcare workers results in the difficult to quantify “lost economic opportunity” for students, who don’t have a chance to participate in meaningful, well-paying jobs and often don’t have a fallback position.
“Massachusetts is world-renowned in the field of healthcare, and yet we are facing a dire workforce shortage in some of the most critical healthcare occupations,” said William Heineman, president, North Shore Community College and chair of the Community College Council of Presidents. “The Massachusetts Community Colleges are grateful to have partnered with the MassINC Policy Center, the Massachusetts Health & Hospital Association, and the Richard and Susan Smith Family Foundation to identify existing barriers and brainstorm solutions to ensure that we are meeting the demands of the field. This collaboration is exactly what is needed to maintain Massachusetts’ reputation as a leader in the industry moving forward.”
This update offers newly revised strategies for a comprehensive approach to healthcare safety and violence prevention across healthcare facilities, including emergency departments, inpatient settings, outpatient clinics, mobile health services, and home healthcare. It also recognizes that because every healthcare organization has its own unique needs, structures, economics, patient populations, and workforce environments, each entity’s response to workplace violence will be different. There is no one single way to implement a workplace violence strategy for a healthcare setting, but these collected strategies can assist.
Over the last few years, the HSVP’s accomplishments include adopting and reporting on a standardized data collection tool, creating a united set of principles for patient-visitor codes of conduct, providing regular education opportunities to disseminate safety and violence prevention strategies from local and national leaders, and advocating for federal and statewide policy changes related to healthcare worker protections. Taken together, these efforts have helped make Massachusetts a recognized national leader in healthcare safety and violence prevention and prompted collaboration and publications with colleagues across the country.
In response to the increased risk of violence in healthcare settings, the Massachusetts Health & Hospital Association’s Healthcare Safety and Violence Prevention Workgroup (HSVPW) developed guidance to help healthcare facilities use evidence-based practices to create effective healthcare violence prevention programs.
Six years after the initial guidance was released, MHA consulted with the workgroup to produce an updated version: Guidelines for Healthcare Safety & Violence Prevention. The updated guidance provides additional strategies that have emerged over the past few years to support member organizations with maintaining a safety culture, reducing risk of violence, and improving wellbeing and outcomes for patients, visitors, providers, and staff.
This update offers newly revised strategies for a comprehensive approach to healthcare safety and violence prevention across healthcare facilities, including emergency departments, inpatient settings, outpatient clinics, mobile health services, and home healthcare. It also recognizes that because every healthcare organization has its own unique needs, structures, economics, patient populations, and workforce environments, each entity’s response to workplace violence will be different. There is no one single way to implement a workplace violence strategy for a healthcare setting, but these collected strategies can assist.
Over the last few years, the HSVP’s accomplishments include adopting and reporting on a standardized data collection tool, creating a united set of principles for patient-visitor codes of conduct, providing regular education opportunities to disseminate safety and violence prevention strategies from local and national leaders, and advocating for federal and statewide policy changes related to healthcare worker protections. Taken together, these efforts have helped make Massachusetts a recognized national leader in healthcare safety and violence prevention and prompted collaboration and publications with colleagues across the country.
The American Hospital Association’s Hospitals Against Violence (HAV) initiative hosted the American Society for Health Care Risk Management (ASHRM) for a facilitated dialogue to explore challenges and current strategies to mitigate the risk of violence. The discussion fostered an exchange of ideas and solutions that informed this issue brief and accompanying case studies.
From AHA:
In 2021, HAV developed the Building a Safe Workplace and Community framework to guide health care leaders in their efforts to prevent and mitigate violence.
This issue brief, the third of four in the series, examines how hospitals’ violence mitigation efforts can fit effectively into an organization’s culture of safety strategy. The brief includes thought-provoking questions to facilitate discussion of how violence mitigation can be integrated seamlessly into the larger framework of patient and worker safety initiatives, supporting an overall culture of safety. It also explores strategies that leaders could take to best support a culture that mitigates violence as part of larger enterprise efforts.
The American Hospital Association’s Hospitals Against Violence (HAV) initiative hosted the American Society for Health Care Risk Management (ASHRM) for a facilitated dialogue to explore challenges and current strategies to mitigate the risk of violence. The discussion fostered an exchange of ideas and solutions that informed this issue brief and accompanying case studies.
From AHA:
In 2021, HAV developed the Building a Safe Workplace and Community framework to guide health care leaders in their efforts to prevent and mitigate violence.
This issue brief examines trauma support for hospital and health system team members. It was developed from discussions the HAV Advisory Group had with the Medical University of South Carolina’s National Mass Violence Victimization Resource Center (NMVVRC) team about the challenges and opportunities to provide trauma support to health care workers following an incident or threat of violence.
The American Hospital Association’s Hospitals Against Violence (HAV) initiative hosted the American SAHA’s Hospitals Against Violence framework helps guide hospital and health system leadership address the issues of violence in their workplaces, with an emphasis on educating and protecting the workforce. In this effort, we must acknowledge that community violence encroaches into the health care setting, and our workforce is part of the community.
Leadership should push for greater data collection, collective accountability, and ongoing education and training. With this approach, we can achieve the four pillars necessary for implementing a comprehensive violence mitigation strategy: trauma support, violence intervention, culture of safety and mitigating risk.
To learn more about the AHA’s Hospitals Against Violence initiative, visit www.aha.org/HAV.
