What Healthcare Trends Will Affect Healthcare Staffing in 2021?

Your Success Is Founded on the Quality of Your People

The healthcare trends we can expect in 2021 have been shaped by our experiences of 2020. It’s now clear that COVID-19 will play a huge part in decision making and business planning within healthcare facilities throughout this year.

Here we look at the top five emerging trends in healthcare provision and how they may impact the provider’s healthcare staffing strategy.

1.    Agile Healthcare Staffing Strategies Will Help Maintain Services

The impact of COVID-19 was felt across all providers in 2020. Perhaps most testing of all was the fluctuating nature of demand. This delivered unpredictable waves of patients, and required diversion of resources across hospitals and other healthcare providers. Many were forced to postpone or cancel high-margin elective procedures.

This year promises to be equally unpredictable and equally demanding. It will be impossible to plan response with a high degree of certainty. Therefore, healthcare providers must be more agile in their approach to healthcare staffing.

To maintain their more profitable operations, healthcare providers must take a more holistic approach to their staffing requirements, and put in place capabilities to draw on experienced staff from outside their organization at speed. This will require greater flexibility of budget and faster response of management. Traditional, time-consuming hiring processes will hamper the ability to respond quickly.

2.    Hospitals Will Become Smarter

One way in which hospitals will be able to deliver greater productivity and higher quality of care is to become smarter. The use of smart technology that enables a hospital to scale up the work their nursing staff do is likely to grow.

Virtual patient monitoring will become normalized, and the efficiencies that this provides will help to recoup the cost of technology investment. We are also likely to see greater digitization of medical records and sharing of third-party data, as well as data retrieved from wearable technology.

What impact might this healthcare trend have on staffing strategy within hospitals? New recruits and temporary nursing staff will need to be more technically adept. HR will need to screen more diligently, and interviews will need to be designed to test a candidate’s ability to monitor virtually, as well as their proficiency to use external data in their daily decision making.

3.    The Telehealth Boom Will Force a Greater Drive for Loyalty

Perhaps the biggest impact on healthcare provision caused by COVID-19 was the explosion in telehealth. As people became more relaxed about virtual healthcare, they became aware of its benefits – access to health data, the ability to select providers more easily, no need to travel to appointments, and so on.

Healthcare providers will find it increasingly difficult to battle this shift. Yet, unless they do their revenues are likely to fall. Therefore, expect hospitals to engage marketing more visibly than before and to use loyalty-building strategies.

Patient loyalty and advocacy will largely depend on the level of care provided. Consequently, healthcare staffing strategies will focus on attracting and retaining high-quality healthcare professionals as the backbone of an organization. Additionally, agile staffing strategies will need to ensure that temporary nursing staff are qualified and experienced to provide personalization of care throughout the patient journey.

4.    Staff Wellness Will Become a Mainstream Policy

2020 has taken a great toll on frontline healthcare professionals. It has been both physically and mentally stressful. To combat employee attrition and greater absenteeism, hospitals are likely to seek to deliver more pronounced staff wellness programs. This may include innovative approaches such as virtual counseling and the targeting of mental health benefits into compensation packages.

The highest-quality nursing candidates are likely to respond more favorably to hospitals who consider mental health and wellness more highly. It’s also likely that screening of candidates will include looking for signs of resilience from candidates.

5.    Healthcare Providers Will Diversify to Grow

Some have called the COVID-19 pandemic a survival of the fittest. It could develop into the survival of the fittest healthcare providers. As we witnessed at the end of the Global Financial Crisis and Great Recession in 2009, the strong survived and thrived while many weaker providers faced bankruptcy.

Stronger, better prepared healthcare providers will expand, diversifying their portfolios and preparing to grow. Their revenue streams will become more resilient, their healthcare staffing more agile, and their patient loyalty will improve.

Healthcare Staffing Will Respond to Healthcare Trends

Healthcare staffing has not altered very much for several decades. The seismic shift in the healthcare market precipitated by COVID-19 will filter down quickly to healthcare staffing. The strategies used by healthcare providers will need to respond to the emerging healthcare trends, and those who are most proactive in their response are likely to benefit.

The quality and agility of your staffing model will ensure that the backbone of your organization – it’s people – remains intact whatever the level of demand on your services.

At Everest, we offer a range of staffing solutions from which you can select the best for your needs – it’s like an á la carte menu of hiring options. These include direct hire, contract-to-hire, and temporary placements. We conduct pre-employment screenings, helping you to reduce time to hire and ensure quality of candidates.

Finally, we offer our ground-breaking Recruiting as a Service (RaaS). This acts as an extension to your recruiting team, enriching the number and quality of candidates as opposed to applicants.

For more information about our services, and to discuss your unique healthcare staffing needs, contact Everest Recruiting today.