Replacement management is essential to ensure continuity of care and maintain sufficient staffing within a department in a healthcare facility. Using locums, external staff, agency workers, or healthcare staff from outside the department is not always synonymous with additional costs: choosing the right type of short-term contract will be decisive. Let’s take a closer look at replacement management in healthcare facilities: let’s take a step back by analysing sector figures before focusing on the operational reality for healthcare teams.
What makes workforce management in healthcare facilities more complex when it comes to recruitment or replacements?
Service management is undermined by structural factors that make organising a department difficult, both due to the rise in sick leave and recruitment challenges:
A) A high frequency of workplace accidents & occupational illnesses
This chart shows that all sectors are affected by the rise in sick leave. It’s no secret that healthcare facilities are particularly impacted, which creates challenges for care teams to welcome patients in good conditions.
B) New hires do not offset departures
The labour market is tight, and the DREES figures do not prove otherwise:
In 2018, DREES noted that healthcare recruitment did not offset departures. Moreover, raising the retirement age is not enough to compensate for people leaving the workforce.
Sources: Euractiv
By 2030, the World Health Organization (WHO) forecasts a projected shortfall of nearly 10 million healthcare professionals worldwide.
In France, there are around 630,000 nurses, but an estimated need for 100,000 additional professionals. According to 2018 data from the Directorate for Research, Studies, Evaluation and Statistics (DREES), the number of nurses is expected to increase by 53% between 2014 and 2040, reaching 881,000, in order to meet the care needs of an ageing population.
The combination of reduced headcount due to absences and recruitment difficulties can make the situation explosive: how can we relieve healthcare professionals despite everything?
Simplifying replacement management to relieve healthcare professionals
A) Quickly visualise how to meet your department’s needs.
According to a Terra Nova report on changing healthcare needs, 4 risk factors are likely to drive an increase in healthcare activity: population ageing, climate change, environmental health, and changes in work.
This increase in needs will weigh on service organisation and will necessarily require optimisation of services
A doctor must be able to easily identify their department’s needs and find solutions to meet them.
The practitioner, and more broadly medical management, cannot afford to waste time ensuring—across a day split into 4 time slots in a 24/7 operation—that staffing is sufficient to cover activity.
That is where HR scheduling and replacement management solutions come in. With some time for adaptation and configuration, there are high-performing solutions to help planners. However, this requires support time to ensure that digital solutions are used optimally.
B) Save time on administrative tasks
Rightly so, administrative tasks are still very poorly perceived by staff and can only be a source of lost time. Excel spreadsheets and direct calls to locums remain very common practices within healthcare facilities.
Despite all the merits Excel may still have, digital solutions have a major advantage: they are interoperable and can connect to other platforms, providing a real-time view of available candidates to cover a shift across different pools (internal, external, agency).
The latest 2023 Markess Blueprint study again shows the low level of equipment for these types of tools, with an adoption rate hovering around 12% for organisations with 50 to 1,000 employees—and this average is even lower in the healthcare sector.
It therefore appears essential to raise awareness among HR and operational stakeholders of new digital practices aimed at reducing the time spent on team scheduling.
This awareness cannot be achieved without deeper knowledge of each department’s specificities, to better understand the challenges around scheduling.
An HR tool is only useful when staff see added value in using it for operational scheduling.
That is why understanding the department, providing support, and clearly identifying processes and needs is key.
Getting support from a consulting firm
A consulting firm above all enables staff to refocus on their core mission: care. The firm supports healthcare facilities by analysing their organisation and processes to reduce the burden of administrative tasks.
Here are some expected benefits:
- Improved steering of needs by department,
- Optimised replacements by ensuring all options have been explored (locums, external, agency),
- Use by managers and practitioners of digital tools rather than Excel,
- Staff involvement in management activities.
With support from an expert, an audit of time and activity management (TAM) processes can be carried out. This analysis provides a solid foundation for determining which optimisation levers to activate: processes, tools…
Althéa to support you: https://althea-groupe.com/offre/gestion-des-temps-activites/
