Talent Planning: The Link Between Caregiver Well-being and the Patient Experience

Optimizing a healthcare organization’s staffing mix is rightly viewed as a way to boost efficiency and reduce costs. What may not be as immediately apparent is the connection between the efficient orchestration of talent and improvements in patient experience, satisfaction, and the quality of care they receive. Let’s examine what can be done to improve the patient experience by enhancing the well-being of healthcare professionals. Improving the patient experience is a goal of every healthcare organization. When thinking about how to improve the patient experience, we need to take a step back and think about all the touchpoints of care, and what each of those look and feel like. Then, we take another step back and look at the processes needed to ensure a healthcare professional is at the right place at the right time to provide care. The most tangible way of measuring the patient experience is through HCAHPS (Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems).

First, as the information is public, low scores can hurt an organization’s reputation, making it harder to attract and retain both patients and healthcare professionals. Tangible strategies and solutions can be implemented to reduce this stress, provide managers more time to support their teams, and ensure staffing can be coordinated more efficiently. Nurses remain very proud to be nurses, provide quality care to patients, teach the next generation, and lead organizations. With this passion and the incredible resiliency of healthcare professionals as motivation, changes can be made through the process of talent planning. A healthcare organization’s finance department provides productivity targets and staffing matrices for other departments across their system. Once the initial work of a staffing plan assessment is done and targets are set, an organization can assess the gaps in what appropriate staffing levels should be and what talent is already employed within the health system.

Partnering with a recruitment solutions firm (also referred to as RPO) enables quick and efficient hiring of quality candidates while lowering cost, ensuring a good cultural fit, and providing a better patient experience. Having the needed talent in place is an important and necessary step, but the next area of focus, proactive management of scheduling and staffing, can make all the difference in the drive to support healthcare professional well-being and improve patient outcomes. The shifts of greatest need can be incentivized weeks in advance, providing a win-win for the organization and the healthcare professional. Utilizing a scheduling tool that provides the ability to see staffing across an entire health system, centralized staffing offices can view staffing levels and needs, allowing more strategic placement of healthcare professionals to smooth staffing across the system. When healthcare professionals are better supported, patients receive better care, enabling them to live their healthiest possible life.