Recognizing Nursing Assistants This Special Week

Far from becoming an employer market, hiring home health care workers is as hard as ever, industry executives say.

In September, Home Health Care News said industry jobs posted on Indeed were trending down, suggesting “home health and home care agencies simply aren’t looking to fill as many positions.” With the national unemployment rate at 8.4% in August and fewer jobs to fill, agencies would have an easier time recruiting.

Even then, some agency leaders felt differently.

“I think we have to respectfully disagree with that point, because it is challenging for us to find caregivers — and very challenging for us also finding the right one,” Ryan Iwamoto, the president and co-founder of 24 Hour Home Care, said in September. “That has been probably the biggest challenge that we’ve had.”

Now, an October survey by myCNAjobs found 57% of 281 participating home health care agencies admitting they are struggling with recruiting staff. Only 5% maintain they are doing well.

Despite a still high unemployment rate, hiring workers has become so much a challenge that 71% of the agencies report turning down business because they didn’t have the staff.

One important reason for the recruiting difficulty, according to 87% of the agencies, is COVID. 72% said the pandemic has also made retention and scheduling more difficult.

Just getting people to apply for a job is difficult. Almost 3 in 10 agencies say they get too few applicants; 23% say they can’t get applicants to call them back. And 35% say when an interview is scheduled, the candidates simply don’t show up.

That’s lead the industry to try bold new recruiting methods and experiment with flexibility in requirements and scheduling for their workers.

“COVID will reshape the labor market in many industries for quite some time,” said Brandi Kurtyka, the CEO of myCNAjobs, speaking at the online conference of the Home Care Association of America last month.

That’s already the case at Alternate Solutions Health Network, one of the largest operators in the country.

Amy Smith, corporate VP of revenue cycles, told Home Health Care News that Alternate Solutions courts restaurant workers. After bringing several on staff, the company discovered their experience in the busy, customer-focused food service environment taught them how to multitask effectively.

Instead of leaning toward candidates with health care experience, the company now looks more for candidates able to multitask, undaunted by the need to “start, pause, start something else, pause, and go back to something that was started weeks ago.”

Photo by Zach Vessels on Unsplash

[bdp_post_carousel]

As the number of coronavirus cases continues to grow, the demand for healthcare workers is surging.

A Glassdoor analysis well before the outbreak was declared a pandemic, said, “Dozens of job postings for health care workers, scientists and data specialists are popping up as organizations prepare for the outbreak.”

More recently, the report’s author Daniel Zhao told public media’s Marketplace, “There is a wide mix of skills needed… [including] epidemiologists or virologists to registered nurses, down to call center or front-desk workers who are helping handle the influx of community questions.”

Here at Green Key Resources we’re experiencing an even greater increase in calls for healthcare workers, especially from nursing homes and medical centers.

“We are seeing a huge uptick in requests from our hospitals for staff to work in all different departments,” says Brett Braterman, Principal within Green Key’s healthcare division in New York City.

“The requests are ranging from registered nurses to lab technologists and medical assistants, where hospitals are preparing for a combination of increase in patients and their own staff unable to work. In addition, our nursing homes have also hit panic mode and gone on a hiring frenzy trying to cover their own staff calling out.”

Even before the coronavirus outbreak, nurses and many other healthcare professionals were in short supply. The situation now has become so critical that New York Governor Andrew Cuomo and Colorado Governor Jared Polis called on former and retired healthcare workers to help.

Cuomo asked that nurses and doctors contact their past employer to “reconnect” with the workforce. New York is sending letters to retired health care professionals and all schools of nursing, public health and medicine encouraging qualified health care personnel to sign up for on-call work.

Healthcare workers anywhere in the nation can also call us at 212.683.1988 or simply upload a resume here. You can also review our open healthcare positions here.

Because of the nature of their job, healthcare workers are particularly at risk of contracting Covid-19. Cuomo said it’s critical to create a reserve of professionals who can fill-in for workers who may fall ill or be ordered quarantined. The Washington Post reported last week that 160 employees of a Massachusetts medical center were quarantined after coming into contact with patients who tested positive. The hospital issued a call for nurses to replace the quarantined professionals.

Nurse.org said Washington State hospitals are hiring hundreds of nurses to help with the influx of cases that have hit the state particularly hard. The report said the Seattle metro area has issued a call for travel nurses from throughout the country to replace nurses who are or will become quarantined and to conduct testing and monitor quarantined individuals.

Quoting the head of a local healthcare staffing firm, Nurse.org says pay rates for these temporary nurses is as high as $2,600 a week. “We really need travel nurses, especially public health nurses, to come work here for at least 13-weeks,” Mona Veiseh, president of the staffing agency told the publication. “These are urgently needed, with crisis pay.”

In particularly hard hit Northern California, San Francisco Mayor London Breed issued an emergency order to expedite the hiring of as many as 100 nurses and health care workers. Special, invitation-only hiring events will be scheduled with job offers made on the spot.

Photo by Ashkan Forouzani on Unsplash

[bdp_post_carousel]