The staffing crunch, however, likely won’t ease anytime soon.
It’s a situation that has forced hospitals, nursing homes and other facilities to scour the country in search of employees and battle one another for high-priced travel workers, all while trying to retain an exhausted staff more tempted than ever to leave the profession.
“From a staffing perspective, it was nothing that we have ever seen, at least in my time in health care,” said Laura Cianflone, an 18-year Catholic Health System employee and its vice president of human resource services.
“It was just the speed at which we needed to recruit, the volume that we needed to recruit on account of, obviously, the waves of Covid and, of course, the demand in the job market alone,” she said.
Still, there are optimistic signs on the horizon.
For one, in her first State of the State address last month, Gov. Kathy Hochul unveiled a proposal to spend $10 billion over several years to support the state's beleaguered health care workforce.
That proposal, to be ironed out with the State Legislature, includes more than $4 billion to support wages and bonuses for employees, part of a bold goal of growing the state’s health care workforce by 20% over the next five years.
The focus on health care staffing isn’t just front and center in Albany. More and more, the topic is taking center stage in labor negotiations, such as last fall’s negotiations between Catholic Health and the union representing 2,500 of its workers that yielded a contract with specific staffing ratios that could influence future health care labor deals.
And maybe some relief could be on the way: Student enrollment in baccalaureate, master’s and doctoral nursing programs increased in 2020, the American Association of Colleges of Nursing reported, indicating that new recruits remain interested in the profession.
But that talent pipeline will take some time to develop, and a larger concern remains that nursing schools across the country are struggling to expand capacity to take on more students.
Meanwhile, the baby boomers continue to age and health care demand grows.
“I think we’re probably going to have some issues with staffing for the foreseeable future, but certainly I don’t think to the degree that we’re at right now,” said Dr. Sam Cloud, Erie County Medical Center’s associate medical director and an attending physician in the emergency department.
Challenges no doubt remain.
The state’s health care workforce is still below pre-pandemic levels and short of where it needs to be to keep up with projected demand.
In the Buffalo Niagara metro area, an estimated 75,000 people worked in health care and social assistance in November, a high for 2021 but below the 80,400 employees in the sector in February 2020, according to state Labor Department data.
The problems go well beyond recruiting clinical professionals. Cianflone said Catholic Health actually hired more nurses in 2021 than it did in 2019.
Where the health system has seen the largest retention issues is in entry-level positions, such as environmental services workers and dietary aides. Those employees play critical roles and represent a significant part of a health care facility’s workforce, and those positions, more than others, are subject to wage pressure from outside industries such as the service sector, where pay has risen.
“That’s definitely been a big challenge for sure,” Cianflone said. “It seems like right now, we’re all kind of competing for the same workforce.”
The competition for all health care jobs has become fierce, requiring employers such as Catholic Health to get creative and try to find ways to stick out.
That could mean tuition reimbursement, career development and making senior leadership accessible. Cianflone pointed out that Catholic Health President and CEO Mark Sullivan attends every new employee orientation.
In the past, most out-of-town recruiting efforts focused on senior leadership positions. But now, Catholic Health and others find themselves recruiting from outside the area for more traditional staff roles.
And to be able to say Buffalo’s population is growing fits right into the pitch.
“I’m not from Buffalo,” Cianflone said. “I’ve been here for 20 years, but I know the stigma that often lingers with Buffalo that we very much try to correct with anyone from out of town, and it’s easy to do now. It is because Buffalo is such a great place to work, the population is growing, there is opportunity here.
“So I think we do focus on that, and we are pulling people in no doubt from across the board, not just locally.”
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