They say a picture is worth a thousand words. Here’s a good one:
Now, let me provide a bit of context: The pandemic deeply impacted our workforce, just as it did businesses and health care organizations worldwide. We lost colleagues to COVID-related illness and death, many folks switched careers or left the workplace altogether, and the pipeline of new recruits all but dried up. By 2022, St. Charles was battling a significant workforce shortage that was hindering our ability to discharge patients and causing serious capacity concerns in our hospitals and clinics.
This trend started to stabilize last year, but as recently as 12 months ago, as you can see, we weren’t yet rebuilding. Last December, the health system saw two more people leave the organization (62) than we hired (60). Not good, and certainly not good enough to replenish our ranks and restore our teams and our culture.
Since then, we have significantly bolstered our retention and recruitment efforts, and the graph above shows that those measures are steadily paying off. October was our best month yet, with 132 caregivers hired and 37 departures. This is what rebuilding a workforce looks like.
The difference between those numbers – 95 more hires than departures in October – is the highest it has been in a year. Year to date, our number of voluntary departures and our number of new hires are vastly improved compared with during the pandemic.
Over the past year our overall vacancy rate has dropped steadily, from nearly 20% in January to 14% in October – again, our lowest number in the past year. We’ll never get to zero — some level of turnover is healthy — but we are back to pre-pandemic baselines and our pipeline of candidates remains strong.
How are we doing it? There is no simple answer, but factors include our health system’s re-commitment to building a great work culture, supporting our supervisors and managers, our recent expansion of behavioral health benefits for caregivers, our robust education and career-advancement programs and, of course, wage increases we implemented earlier this year. It also helps that, for most people, getting a job with St. Charles means getting to live and work in wonderful Central Oregon.
When we say our priority is our people at St. Charles, we mean it. The progress we are making with our workforce is proof that we back that belief up with action. And we take action because we know that to provide the best possible care for the communities we serve, we need world-class caregivers.
I am grateful to all of them – the new arrivals, the long-timers and everyone in between – for their tremendous work.
Sincerely,
Steve
