The Patients are Coming, The Patients are Coming. The Impact of ACA on Your Facility's Staffing Levels
In January, 3.3 million Americans signed up for health insurance thanks to the Affordable Care Act (ACA). February’s numbers will – more than likely – be equal to January’s, and there will probably be a last-minute “surge” of procrastinators in March. Human nature is human nature.
Therefore, by the end of March, around 6 million more Americans will have health insurance. With this new expanded reach of health insurance come new patients. With new patients comes the need to reevaluate staffing levels and begin proactively planning for the additional medical staff that will need to be hired.
And hired quickly. March 31st is around the corner.
Therefore, you need to be as preemptive as possible in your hiring process, and planning goes a long way. You will need to:
- Work with community leaders and local businesses to try to project the number of new patients.
- Establish the impact that this projected number of new patients will have on current staffing levels.
- Evaluate this impact on staff burnout.
- Identify staff who are ready for retirement or may be at risk to leave the profession.
- Recruit additional staff.
However, it is not enough to know how many people need to come onboard. You need to be very aware of the amount of time it will take to find these people.
According to the Society for Human Resource Management, the typical time to hire ranges between 29 days (for smaller organizations) and 43 days (for larger organizations). That is between a month and a month and a half. Your open positions cannot wait that long. Patients do not wait, and you need more staff to provide a high level of care to this new flow of patients.
However, finding your best-fit candidate is not like opening a box of assorted chocolates. Candidates are not going to simply appear, all nicely organized and ready to be evaluated (with a nice synopsis of their differences attached).
You will need help. You need a staffing firm that can find and evaluate candidates quickly and efficiently so you don’t waste time connecting with the wrong people while the right candidate is gobbled up by someone else. You need an expert.
You need a staffing partner who can
- sell your employer brand.
- leverage social media, mobile and online recruiting.
- deliver a vast pool of temporary workers to maintain staffing levels during the search.
At Snelling, we have the expertise and the knowledge to find your best-fit candidates. Recruiting and staffing is all we do, and we use multiple channels to do it. Social media? Yep. Online recruiting? Yep. Phone and cloud-based screening interviews? Yep. With our centralized recruiting arm, we can find the right candidate with the right skills – no matter the location. You need a staffing firm with the expertise to use multiple recruiting channels 24/7, and that is what you have with Snelling Medical Professionals. The local knowledge combined with the national footprint to find your next best-fit candidate. Contact us today!
By Christiane Soto, 
