Kaufman: West Virginia hospitals doing 'amazing' work to address staffing

The West Virginia Hospital Association works with 62 hospitals in the state to improve quality, data, public policy, finance policy and education, Kaufman said.

“Hospitals come together jointly to work together to make the state better,” Kaufman said. “For example, in our data and quality programs, they are looking at ways to work together sharing information to improve the quality of care across the state. The hospitals are doing their efforts, and we take best practice to share that.”

While most hospitals are looking at their own staffing issues, Kaufman and his team are trying to increase the pipeline of health care professionals across the state. They’re working with Gov. Jim Justice and the West Virginia Legislature to increase the number of slots in higher education institutions across the state.

For example, nursing slots increased by 800 in 2021 when the governor committed $48 million addressing West Virginia’s nursing workforce shortage.

Although the initiative was launched over a year ago, it takes a minimum of 18 months to produce a new nurse, Kaufman said.

“We should (start) to see those benefits of those nurses at the end of this year,” Kaufman said.

Kaufman and his team are increasing the pipeline and bringing awareness to the opportunities in health care by educating school counselors on jobs such as respiratory therapy, radiology technology and medical labs and classes students would need to take for those professions.

“It is not all dealing with blood and patients directly,” Kaufman said. “We need all these professions in addition to IT people, budget people, environmental services, supply chain. I mean it is really across the board that we need people.”

Kaufman and his team are working to develop a culture within the state’s hospitals to support and retain the health professionals they recruit.

For WVU Medicine United Hospital Center, recruitment began first by finding the right recruiters who understood the culture of the hospital so that they could sell the area and the state, said David F. Hess, MD, UHC president and CEO.

“We have found these people, and they are doing a much better job at getting recruits in the building,” Hess said. “Recruits sense the pride, the rich history of excellence, and the ‘can-do’ mentality of our staff and they usually want to be a part of it.”

UHC staffing is still not where Hess would like it to be, but to supplement, the hospital is using agency staffing to help employed staff with the workload.

“We don’t want our loyal, heroic employees to burn out, so we have to surround them with help that sometimes will come from our staffing agency,” Hess said.

Recently, UHC has added the Aspiring Nurse Program. This program provides financial and human-centered support to nursing students enrolled at select schools in West Virginia.

Nursing students accepted into the program receive up to $25,000 that includes a sign-on bonus and expense funding over the span of four semesters, in exchange for a three-year work commitment.

“Our Aspiring Nurse program has been a huge success across the system and especially here at UHC. Our forward-thinking nursing leadership created a unique program that addressed real-world challenges for these student nurses,” Hess said. “This program has driven many more recruits to look at and sign up for future employment.

“We keep enhancing our overall benefits package that includes career ladders that enhances pay, exceptional health care benefits and a tremendous retirement program that not many other industries, or even hospital systems, can match.”

If there is a surge of patients during cold and flu season, Hess plans to rely on an internal staffing group within the WVU Medicine health system. This group was created by the system’s Human Resources department during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Employees within the group are paid a premium rate to travel internally throughout the health system to provide support at different hospitals.

“If the surge gets bad enough, we may have to go back to the agency pool and bring in agency nurses. We hope that it doesn’t come to that point but are willing to do what we need to do to take care of our community and region,” Hess said.

Dr. Mark Povroznik, vice president of quality and chief quality officer for UHC, said he and his team have an ongoing staffing review that is completed every 4-8 hours on a continuous basis so they can identify any staffing shortages and make accommodations.

“Our contingency plan always includes redeployment of non-critical positions, should the need arise,” Povroznik said. “For example, our Education Department are certified, trained RN’s that teach during the week. But if we needed to, we would redeploy individuals like that to support patient needs.”

UHC also maintains a “Float Pool” of nursing staff that are trained to work in a variety of areas and are deployed to backfill when a unit has a call off.

“Overall, staffing at UHC is much improved compared to the COVID pandemic,” Hess said. “Although we still haven’t fully rebounded to our pre-pandemic staffing levels, we are improving each month.”

Kaufman encourages the public to do their part in the upcoming flu and cold season by getting the flu vaccine because it can reduce the intensity of the disease and make it less likely for a hospital visit which then makes hospital staffing and resources go further.

“That’s the one nice thing about West Virginia, we all want to take care of each other. By the public doing their part in getting the flu vaccine, washing their hands and taking care of themselves, it helps the hospitals,” Kaufman said.