Harnessing technology to solve staffing shortages in healthcare

• A vicious cycle of “recrention” – where recruitment comes at the expense of retention – underpins many global healthcare workforce problems
• Technology has a key role to play in helping boost staff retention by addressing the underlying challenges clinicians are facing
• Involving clinicians in digital innovation is essential for creating solutions that have a genuine impact on the workforce and sustainably resolve healthcare staff retention issues

10 million – that’s the global number of healthcare workers we’re likely to be short by 2030, according to the World Health Organization.¹ Healthcare staffing problems that existed pre-pandemic have intensified significantly in recent years. While challenges vary from country to country, common drivers include a lack of funding, limited training resources, intensifying patient demand, and rising medical staff exit rates due to inflexible working and unsustainable pressures.²

Across the globe, these staffing shortages in healthcare are often linked to the cycle of “recrention” – where recruitment is prioritized at the expense of a meaningful focus on retention. This means that while healthcare services are struggling to train and recruit enough new staff to plug existing gaps and meet increasing patient demand, they are also struggling to hold onto recruits or to keep the staff they already have.³

The NHS is a prime example of how healthcare systems and services are getting tripped up by “recrention”. While recent figures show a promising increase in the number of doctors and nurses joining the health service, almost half of NHS staff are thought to be looking for jobs elsewhere, with reasons including unsustainable workload, stress/burnout, staff shortages, and pay.^4,5  NHS teams are working tirelessly to try and tackle these issues and empower staff to remain happy and healthy in their roles. But they face a number of significant hurdles, not least the outdated systems and lack of effective healthcare staffing technology at their disposal, making it impossible to deliver the changes needed to achieve genuine change at scale.

I experienced this reality firsthand during my time at the frontline of medicine. My colleagues and I routinely received our work rotations (rotas) just a few weeks in advance, which meant booking holidays or planning for key life events became almost impossible. I had friends who had to negotiate last-minute shift swaps so they could attend their own wedding. Others missed special moments like nativity plays or family events. We found that the lack of control could grind you down and gradually induce burnout.

Reaching a balance where recruitment and retention are equally prioritized is key to solving global healthcare staffing problems, and technology arguably has a pivotal role to play in arming our healthcare services with the tools to get there.

Whilst probably no one enters into medicine thinking they’ll have full control over their hours or never have to work a night shift, an element of flexibility is essential to supporting staff well-being and work-life balance. Many healthcare workforce teams desperately want to facilitate greater flexibility for clinicians, but the circumstances and systems within which they have to organize staffing present a significant barrier. Not only are they up against the pressure of rising staff shortages and intensifying service demand, but the time-consuming inefficiency of the complex, manual, or outdated digital workforce systems at their disposal can make building flexibility into healthcare rotations an impossible task.

This has a significant knock-on effect on staff retention. Rigid work schedules, inflexible hours, and difficulty booking annual leave are just a few examples of how current systems are fueling employee burnout and forcing many clinicians to leave behind the careers they’ve worked so hard to build.⁶

Healthcare teams need smarter, more dynamic systems to streamline workforce planning and make it easier to grant clinicians the flexibility they need while keeping services safely and sustainably staffed.

Work rotation scheduling requires systems that provide simultaneous access to multiple sources of information including service demand, contracted hours, and individual clinicians’ needs and preferences. It’s therefore important to build smart scheduling systems that bring together all rostering, rotation (rota) planning, and leave activity in one place.

Technology can also help to boost flexibility within temporary staffing. Digital staff banks, which make it easier for healthcare organizations to fill vacant shifts using locum clinicians, can help to reduce staff shortages while allowing clinicians to pick up shifts that suit them, working flexibly in line with their external responsibilities and commitments.

Smarter digital workforce systems can unlock a transformational level of flexibility for healthcare managers and their clinicians, significantly boosting long-term well-being and retention.

Data is another incredibly powerful tool for boosting staff retention and easing healthcare staffing problems. Access to insights on staffing trends – such as absences, shift gaps, fill rates, and pay rates – can empower workforce teams to identify areas of highest demand or those in need of improvement, and take strategic action to reduce workforce shortages.

However, too often, these data insights lie locked away in siloes, hidden within complex, outdated, or disconnected workforce systems. The time and effort required to locate and effectively collate or share this data means that workforce teams often do not have the time to harness the valuable insights this data holds.

Fast-growing technologies can help us unlock workforce data, making it readily available to the teams that need it for forward planning. Something which can be further boosted by the evolving power of machine learning capabilities. When used to enhance the automation of some of the more complex processes of data collection and analysis, machine learning can help to surface valuable insights and enable timely decision-making, while cutting down administrative time and cost.

With simpler, more direct, and comprehensive oversight of workforce data, healthcare teams can effectively utilize these insights to facilitate more dynamic, flexible workforce planning. This in turn can unlock the structural changes needed to deliver better staffing approaches and work-life balance for staff.

While technology holds great potential for tackling the challenges fueling healthcare staffing problems, healthcare staff are rarely directly consulted during the process of adopting a new system.

This major oversight can be addressed by consulting frontline clinicians and managers, who are on the ground grappling with the realities of the staffing crisis and have unparalleled insight into the underlying pain points that need to be addressed.

This by no means says that every solution to the healthcare staffing crisis must be designed exclusively by clinicians. However, involving healthcare staff in the process of building a solution can help significantly increase its chances of success.

We need to make it easier for clinicians to get hands-on with digital innovation, empowering them to find and help develop the tools to directly address the challenges that are impacting their daily work. Collaborating closely with frontline clinicians is key to understanding the complexities of the pressures driving so many to leave, and then designing solutions that truly answer their needs and support them to remain in their roles.

Healthcare staff shortages are a global problem, driven by a diverse range of challenges and nuances, and “recrention” is a universal issue in health systems. Technology can help us to balance recruitment with greater retention, by streamlining workforce planning, increasing flexibility, and making better use of data to adapt to the evolving needs of our changing healthcare workforce. Harnessed effectively, with input and influence from clinicians themselves, it can help us to significantly ease underlying staffing pressures and build a happier, healthier workforce for future generations to come.