Page 18 - BusinessWest November 10, 2021

tion still resonates.
This past year did bring some relief, she noted,
from the end of the extra-large unemployment checks to the expedited vaccine rollout to health- care workers in February and March. However, the tight labor market has also created a competi- tive situation in which nurses, certified nursing assistants (CNAs), home health aides, and oth- ers are willing to jump from job to job for a pay bump — and companies are, indeed, offering those bumps.
“If I work for company A and company B offers me a quarter more an hour, I’m going to company B,” she said in explaining the mindset. “Then,
if company C offers more than company B, I’m going to company C. Competition for home-care workers and other healthcare workers is through the roof.
“The reimbursements haven’t gone up, but payouts have gone up,” she went on. “A lot of companies are just not able to do that; if you don’t have a certain volume, you’re out of business.”
Wearing her staffing-agency hat for a moment, Flahive-Dickson noted that Massachusetts is the only state in the country that puts a cap on what a staffing agency can charge a facility; in fact, it’s illegal to go over the cap.
“Everyone is trying to outbid each other, and these employees find themselves jumping from opportunity to opportunity simply because the opportunity is there. You can’t blame them for doing that, but it’s completely unsustainable.”
Agency nurses are causing financial problems for hospitals because of the pay they command, Hatiras said. As a result, nurses are leaving their employers, signing on with agencies as ‘travelers,’ and then often returning to the same hospitals at
two or three times the pay.
“The staff is making significantly more money,
and it enriches those agencies, but the hospi- tals and consumers are footing the bill,” he said. “That’s an additional problem for us, but we’re not alone.”
HMC offers stability of schedule, without the travel, that agencies can’t, he noted, and has been offering incentives — like bonuses for signing up and for staying on for a certain amount of time, as well as tuition reimbursement and loan forgive- ness. “But we can’t match
the $100 an hour agencies
are paying.”
and state-level efforts to create reciprocity have run into union resistance. But he added that any effort to put more workers in the pipeline locally would be welcome.
“I don’t know if the pandemic has discour- aged people who ordinarily would want to get into nursing but are staying away from it,” he told BusinessWest.
One step Holyoke Medical Center has taken is to reduce the volume of non-clinical work that its nurses do, like personal hygiene, handling phone
What all this means,
Berman said, is that
“employees have far more
power to be very dis-
criminating about their
future employment. I
think that’s wonderful —
it does require employers
to think differently than
in the past. You can’t take
for granted that people will show up at your door. You need to do a better job of messaging: ‘this is a good place to work; everyone is treated fairly.’”
And not just say it, but back it up, he added.
“Competitive providers are raising wages, which is one of the positive impacts. It’s tough on employers, but those employers are becoming more competitive in terms of working conditions and wages, and that should not be minimized.”
Priming the Pump
Hatiras said the lack of interstate licensing rec- iprocity doesn’t help efforts to boost nursing staff,
”
“If you’re getting paid $15 or $16 an hour to potentially expose yourself to COVID by entering someone’s home, why not stay home and get paid $25 an hour to stay home? We had the same issues every other industry had: the government simply made it way too easy to stay home.
calls, and procuring supplies. In that way, the workforce crunch is lessened not by hiring more nurses — which the hospital would do if it could — but giving them more time to do the clinical work they’re uniquely trained to do.
“We decided to go to a model where we add more more staff that acts in a support role — cer- tified nursing assistants, phlebotomists, secretari- al help. At times when staffing is down, those sup- port functions will take some of those duties and responsibilities off nurses and give nurses more time to be able to do medication management, care documentation, all that.”
The goal in the past has been one CNA for
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