Anywhere you go in the healthcare sector you will find a shortage of qualified workers. From highly paid clinicians all the way down to entry-level support staff, there are not enough qualified people applying for all the available jobs. Thank goodness healthcare facilities have staffing agencies at their disposal. Staffing agencies provide invaluable service that keep healthcare afloat.
Staffing agencies fill the vital role of touch point between HR departments and job seekers. Some agencies focus only on support staff and allied health workers. Others focus exclusively on clinicians. Still others supply healthcare workers of all categories – both permanent staff and locum tenens included.
If you are unaware of the significant role staffing agencies play in healthcare staffing, here are three ways they are keeping healthcare afloat:
1. Handling the Heavy Lifting
The two most challenging tasks in staffing are recruiting and hiring. These two constitute the heavy lifting in the HR department. Staffing agencies handle it like the experienced pros they are. Unlike HR departments, they excel at what they do because recruiting and hiring is all they do. They can do in a short amount of time what takes a typical HR department much longer to do.
Let us face the fact that HR personnel have a lot on their plates. They do a lot more than post job openings and conduct interviews. Taking the heavy lifting from their shoulders frees them up to do more important things while the real experts go out and find the right candidates for every opening.
2. Providing MSP Programs
Next up, staffing agencies are helping keep healthcare afloat by providing managed service provider (MSP) programs to their clients. And MSP program is one that creates a partnership between staffing agency and healthcare facilities to manage staffing needs together. It deals primarily with locum tenens staffing, though MSP programs do touch permanent staffing as well.
The benefit of an MSP program to the healthcare facility is having a partner who can take on most of the recruiting, interviewing, and onboarding processes. In most cases, staffing agencies can also handle licensing and credentialing issues. That leaves the hiring facility with less to do.
A good MSP program also benefits facilities by giving them an easier way to manage all their locum providers. Using a vendor management system provided by the staffing agency gives facilities access to state-of-the-art software that relies on artificial intelligence, analytics, and data to keep everything moving right along.
3. Giving Healthcare Workers Another Option
This third and final consideration may surprise you: staffing agencies are giving healthcare workers yet another employment option. This is more important than you might know. The point can easily be illustrated by the number of private practices that have been either bought out, absorbed by larger systems, or sold in the last decade.
Clinicians deciding to get out of private practice need somewhere else to go. But what if they prefer to remain self-employed rather than taking a full-time job at a hospital or clinic? Staffing agencies offer that opportunity through locum tenens. A locum tenens clinician is a self-employed contractor who still controls his or her own career. Without such an option, some clinicians would undoubtedly retire or find another line of work.
From MSP programs to vendor management systems, staffing agencies have a number of valuable tools they can leverage to keep healthcare facilities staffed. In so doing, they are also keeping our healthcare system afloat. Staffing agencies are doing the heavy lifting and connecting employers with workers to ensure staffing holes are filled.
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