Medical Solutions was engaged by a 300-bed facility in the New York City area to assist with finding enough RNs to keep up with an increase in patients due to a surge of COVID-19 cases.
Prior to the pandemic, Medical Solutions has been assisting the hospital with all their staffing needs for eight years and has been their MSP for three years.
Recruitment Strategy & Execution
With the demand for nurses being high throughout New York and the client needing highly skilled clinicians as soon as possible, it was important to have a strategy that allowed placements to be filled quickly.
In order to efficiently find enough nurses for the facility and ensure the directors continued to provide the best patient care, Medical Solutions and the hospital decided they would have Medical Solutions’ internal nurse managers conduct interviews and make offers. Prior to the pandemic, only nurses with a New York license could receive an offer. However, with the New York Pandemic Licensure allowing nurses with another state license to work in New York, we were able to expand the candidate pool, making it easier to find the clinicians we were looking for.
While Medical Solutions knew that the Pandemic Licensure would help expand their reach to obtain enough RNs, they still needed to make sure compliance was swift. They worked with the Joint Commission to create a Rapid Response Protocol, which cut onboarding time in half by allowing nurses to start once they met the minimal requirements, but still had some items pending.
Beneficial to the recruitment strategy was the facility’s openness to increasing their bill rates. After doing research on the market, Medical Solutions found that in order to compete with the surrounding hospitals to attract new talent as well as keep their existing talent, they would need to offer higher bill rates. Sharing this information with the hospital’s CEO, the facility took Medical Solutions’ advice and agreed to do whatever was necessary for the hospital to secure the staff they desperately needed.
Results
Over the course of the recruitment campaign, Medical Solutions had an open line of communication with the facility every morning, including weekends, providing an update about onboarding, the number of offers, and how many people they placed. The team placed 103 nurses for the client: 40 RNs already had contracts and were working at the facility, and an additional 32 were placed for ICU, 19 for ER, 10 for Med-Surg/Tele, and 2 for Dialysis due to the Rapid Response Protocol—all nurses that were placed also completed their contracts. While the process to fill this many jobs takes an average of 3-4 weeks, Medical Solutions was able to complete the task in one week.
The result of the partnership between Medical Solutions and the client was once again successful and remains successful. Medical Solutions continues to provide nurses for any COVID-related needs, as well as nurses in preparation for the upcoming flu and holiday season. The client also introduced Medical Solutions to other hospitals in the NYC area, which resulted in four more facilities having their staffing needs filled as quickly as possible.