How Healthcare Facilities Are Solving Staffing Shortages

By Your Health Magazine

Your Health Magazine

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How Healthcare Facilities Are Solving Staffing Shortages

Have you ever been in a hospital waiting room, concerned about a long delay? That experience is often a direct result of a wider problem: the healthcare staffing shortage.

Healthcare staffing shortages are putting patients, clinicians, and medical facilities at high risk. If a facility is short-staffed, there is a higher likelihood that patients will not receive the care they truly need. Staffing shortages increase the risk of poor patient outcomes, such as:

• Medication errors
• Falls
• Higher mortality rates

The silver lining: While there isn’t a single solution, facilities are aligning short-term band-aids with long-term system changes to keep beds open, conserve capacity, and provide quality care.

This article discusses how hospitals cope with staffing shortages today and explores the most effective strategies that help facilities adapt and triumph.

Understanding the healthcare staffing shortage

What is a “staffing shortage”?

A staffing shortage refers to a situation where the quantity of available, qualified clinicians and supporting staff is insufficient to meet patient demand safely.

A staffing shortage is not simply a recruitment problem; it’s a gap in coverage that can compromise essential aspects of a facility, such as:

• Care delivery
• Throughput
• Outcomes

Healthcare staffing shortages appear in real-world environments as closed beds, longer wait times, required overtime, delayed discharges, and fewer services delivered. Although the costs of understaffing are varied and complex, patients are ultimately the most affected.

Root causes of healthcare staffing shortages

Let’s take a look at some of the causes that can worsen the staffing shortage in a facility:

• Burnout in healthcare: Years of high workloads, shift instability, and moral distress have led many nurses to reduce their hours or leave the field entirely. Burnout is a significant driver of clinician turnover.
• Workforce aging: A significant proportion of experienced nurses, physicians, and allied health professionals are nearing retirement, depleting the pool of mentors and preceptors and eroding institutional memory.
• Pipeline shortages: Reduced training positions and faculty constraints lower the pipeline of recent graduates. Visa delays can also constrain foreign hiring.
• Geographic maldistribution: Talent tends to agglomerate in urban locations, while rural facilities often struggle to recruit and retain staff due to lower salary scales, fewer benefits, and limited career advancement opportunities.

Of course, there is also a need for supportive government policies, such as increased funding for nursing schools, loan forgiveness programs, and other initiatives.

Common dilemmas healthcare facilities face

The impact of staffing shortages on patient care is real. When staff are overworked, evidence shows higher rates of adverse events, readmissions, and treatment delays. Some common dilemmas this situation brings include:

• Financial costs: Executives have to weigh wage pressures, inflation, and payer mix against the urgent need to fill units. High-cost labor through staffing agencies can occasionally be a lifesaver, but long-term dependence can seriously hurt budgets, creating a difficult cycle to maintain.
• Safety and credentialing regulations: Contracting temporary staff requires strict vetting of skills, certifications, and licenses—sometimes from different states—to ensure patient safety.
• Resistance and cultural transformation: Abrupt changes in hospital staff models can erode morale if not executed judiciously. Nurses can feel fatigue resulting from change, perceived differences in pay or scheduling, and disruptions to the work process.
• Lower pay in rural settings: Rural and critical access hospitals face reduced pools of candidates, fewer local training programs, housing unavailability, and challenges with spousal job placement.

The price tag of understaffing also manifests in penalties related to quality metrics, lost reimbursement from closed beds, and increased premium labor costs. Most importantly, patient safety suffers when clinicians are distracted and pulled in many directions.

Strategies healthcare facilities can employ

A healthcare facility can benefit from knowing that there are various options to address a shortage.

1. Travel nursing, contract staffing, and agency models

A facility can benefit from the strategic use of different staffing models, such as:

• Travel nursing
• Staffing agencies in healthcare
• Local contracts
• Per diem staffing platforms

These options can help fill short-term gaps, support seasonal surges, and maintain high-priority services. 

Good leaders utilize temporary staffing options as partners, not crutches. Healthcare leaders must forecast demand, streamline onboarding, match assignments to skills, and track performance and cost.

One of the preferred and modern options for facilities is the use of per diem or PRN staffing platforms. Platforms such as Nursa connect facilities with credentialed clinicians for on-demand shifts, allowing managers to adjust staffing levels to match acuity and daily census. 

When used effectively, these platforms reduce time-to-fill, control overtime, and prevent overreliance on long-term travel nursing contracts by adjusting local capacity.

2. Float staff, cross-training, internal redeployment

Another effective staffing strategy is to establish an internal float pool. Cross-training allied and nursing staff between similar units increases flexibility without sacrificing safety. Cross-training staff helps ensure that even if a regular unit nurse is tied up, a similarly qualified professional can step in, reducing delays in patient care.

These models can help expand coverage and reduce labor costs, but they offer limited talent pools and can lead to burnout.

3. Improve healthcare recruitment and retention strategies

Hiring tomorrow’s employees isn’t simply about scheduling staff—it’s about building a workplace that employees want to stay in. Here are some high-impact tactics:

• Competitive, transparent compensation
• Education assistance and career ladders, such as specialty certifications and residency programs, along with tuition benefits
• Intelligent and flexible scheduling, along with avoiding forced overtime policies
• Support for wellbeing, such as access to mental health resources, decompression time, and psychologically safe cultures

4. Canceling non-essential services, scaling down elective care

During peak shortages, hospitals and other healthcare facilities can temporarily scale back on some services to preserve patient safety:

• Reduce or shut down elective surgeries
• Shut down low-volume departments
• Consolidate services to where patient safety is most crucial

For this purpose, facilities require clear triage criteria, daily capacity huddles, and transparent communication with patients, payers, and the public to minimize disruptions.

5. Technology and virtual care solutions

A facility might also benefit from other technology-driven solutions, such as:

• AI predictive analytics
• Telehealth and virtual nursing models
• Automation for non-clinical tasks

Facilities need various strategies to ensure quality patient care

Healthcare staffing shortages are complex, but they’re not insurmountable.

The most resilient organizations don’t use one single solution, but instead combine solutions:

• Flexible access to travel nursing and per diem staffing platforms for short-term requirements
• Internal float pools, cross-training, and more intelligent scheduling for operational agility
• Robust recruitment and healthcare staff retention programs for stabilizing the workforce over the long term

However, the hospitals and other facilities that weather the healthcare workforce shortage share one thing in common: They invest in their people, utilize data to match staffing to need, diversify staffing models, and build alliances to preserve access to care.

By employing this multi-pronged approach, hospitals and other facilities aren’t just filling shifts; they are building more resilient, flexible, and safer systems, ensuring you, the patient, receive the high-quality care you deserve.