Healthcare organizations are increasingly challenged by persistent patient care staffing shortages that threaten the continuity of safe clinical operations. In response, leaders are often required to redeploy ancillary staff into direct care support roles. While effective in the short term, this strategy requires deliberate planning to ensure staff readiness, maintain patient safety, and sustain operational integrity.
Managing your healthcare team to ensure you have the right people with the right skills in the right place at the right time means that you must maintain a clear understanding of what resources you have in terms of skill, role, and availability. It’s imperative to know what your organization needs and what assets you have available to meet those needs. This includes not only those requirements during the day but also those after hours and on weekends. Some organizations can utilize robust staffing platforms that can assign and track staff in their workforce. Others may be relegated to using less advanced tools. The most important factor is that organizations must be able to identify their workforce gaps in real time and, ideally, well in advance, to adjust their resources and/or services.
Healthcare, as with other industries, must ensure it is maximizing its employees’ skills and experience to sustain its services. They should also look for opportunities to expand on these skills and work experiences in roles that, although not primary to the current position, may serve in other roles to sustain operations. Organizations should ensure they catalog the skills and work experiences of their staff and be able to readily identify their staff who may be able to serve in an expanded or varied capacity. Some organizations have established adjunct roles as part of the employee’s primary work responsibilities. These are often tied to the organization’s Emergency Response Plan to mitigate workforce gaps. A review of employee roles should be conducted to determine whether individuals in these positions can be reassigned to address critical manpower gaps. For example, can staff in Medical Records be used to monitor patients who are identified as a suicide risk, provided they are trained? Can some of their work be placed on hold until the staffing issue is resolved? Can you restrict or shut down services to reroute staff to direct care roles? The traditional concept of ‘non-essential personnel’ is evolving. In modern healthcare emergency operations, all staff represent potential operational assets when properly trained and deployed
Organizations should communicate manpower optimization plans with staff who may be called upon to provide additional support. This may be part of the hiring process or the annual education and training plan. It’s imperative that employees are aware of any role/responsibilities, scope of practice, and preparations (training, orientation, etc.) that will be necessary. These assignments should be in writing, with a copy provided to the employee, to ensure a record of the communication and the expectations of both the employee and the organization, and to support success. Organizations have assigned these additional roles to help employees expand their skills, making them more marketable and, in some cases, to gain additional pay or opportunities for upward mobility within the organization.
Organizations must define and deliver role-specific training and competency validation before redeploying staff. These depend on the role the staff member will be supporting. These requirements should already be in place for staff members who are serving in these positions. Coordination with Staff Development, clinic educators, and Department Leaders will be essential to ensure that adjunct staff are adequately prepared to provide safe patient care. This would include developing a list of required orientation, training, and competencies (as applicable). The organization will need to invest in supporting these adjunct staff in completing their required training and in ensuring that these skills remain up to date. Identifying staff who are deficient in these additional training/competency requirements should be a priority to ensure adequate time is provided to retrain and reassess deficient skills. This allows the organization to remain ready to respond with prepared assets in the event of staffing gaps. Consideration should be given to including staffing gaps in any EM drill to assess whether staff are available and trained to support patient care needs. The organization needs to define the criteria for initiating cross-utilization of staff and ensure that resources are prepared to serve in that capacity. These may include:
As the staffing gap is eliminated and the need for adjunct staff no longer exists, it is important to re-establish normal operations as efficiently as possible. Depending on the extent of the staffing gap, it may be necessary to reorient adjunct staff to their original roles. If possible, organizations may wish to rotate these staff frequently between the adjunct role and their original position to maintain their skills and sustain operations, as necessary. Many organizations have embraced a new “normal” in which staffing gaps persist, and employees frequently shuffle between adjunct and regular positions.
It’s important that adjunct staff are debriefed on their experience. Their feedback can provide essential insight into the effectiveness of any training and other identified gaps in the transition for the role they supported. Likewise, it is important to query the clinical staff about the effectiveness of the adjunct staff and whether they felt the support provided was sufficient to ensure patient safety and effective care. The organization should also commit to recognizing adjunct staff who consistently volunteer to support patient care and who go above and beyond in their roles.
Sustained staffing shortages require healthcare leaders to move beyond reactive staffing models and adopt structured, emergency management–driven workforce strategies. Organizations that proactively assess gaps, prepare staff for expanded roles, and continuously evaluate performance will be better positioned to maintain safe, reliable patient care despite ongoing workforce challenges.
For questions or to learn more, contact the C&A team at 704-573-4535 or email us at info@courtemanche-assocs.com.
