When your facility is understaffed, you’re looking for more than recruiting solutions; you’re also hoping to come up with a strategy that eliminates problems and stops them from coming back. That can be tough in the current healthcare landscape, where nursing shortages, state mandated nurse-to-patient ratios, and last minute scheduling conflicts leave your clinic or hospital in a lurch.

These strategies are used by experienced staffing agencies, and can help your medical facility turn a stressful situation into an opportunity!

#1: Don’t ask your staff to take on more. Your entire staff is already working at maximum capacity, and it’s hard to keep your retention rate high if the talent burns out. Work as a team to find the solution. Schedule an emergency meeting. The staff needs to come forward with their workload issues and offer individual solutions until these come together and work for everyone. This approach is likely to illuminate common goals and help create a unified road map in how to move forward as a team.

#2: Make sure that upper management is aware of the problem; and if you are upper management, be prepared to document that patient volume is down, or that the facility’s reputation is suffering from being shorthanded. Ask for, or consider alternate resources to handle the workload, such as hiring temporary employees. Communicate with leadership that you weren’t able to achieve perfect patient satisfaction in light of having to serve “x” number of patients; this supports your request for adequate staffing.

#3: Strive for balance and effective communication with your staff. Openly discuss what your goals and priorities are for the healthcare facility, and see how this measures up with the rest of your team. Set a time limit for accomplishing each goal. Ask your staff what they think could be done differently, to get better results with more efficiency.

#4: Attribute successes to the team and not just one person. While it’s important to have long-term goals, it’s also important to recognize the small milestones achieved along the way. Take any opportunity to band together, achieve, and then celebrate the met goal—such as raising awareness for a healthcare cause, or encouraging the team to get vaccinated during flu season. This promotes an environment of cross team effort that benefits more than just one area of your medical facility.

#5: Utilize the other staff to the full extent that you are allowed to do so. Not all nurses and physicians utilize the medical assistants or unlicensed staff in their department; as long as they are used within their job description, assistants can help ease the workload.

Look to an Experienced Healthcare Staffing Agency as an Alliance

At Team1Medical, we are strategic in our approach to solving your staffing issues. We give it to you straight, and in turn provide the talented candidates we submit to you with fair representation of the employer, even when you’re not in the room. Our recruiters provide VIP customer care—that means constant feedback on new hires that lets you know your healthcare professionals are working to their highest potential. Call 713-590-2980 or request coverage online to learn more!