The importance of cross-training in allied healthcare settings

Cross-training is a strategic approach within healthcare facilities to upskill their existing allied healthcare staff beyond their primary roles. This strategy helps the facilities equip professionals with the advanced skills necessary to work in various cross-roles. Cross-training is always provided under the supervision of experienced professionals working in the concerned domain. It not only helps the facilities optimize the current workforce but also enhances the practical exposure and knowledge of allied health professionals in various functional areas. Moreover, the practice of cross-training aids in continued patient care delivery in case of an emergency or even when the concerned staff is off duty. 

Most healthcare facilities have to substitute or hire allied health professionals due to various reasons such as staff unavailability, turnover, and burnout. In most of the above scenarios, facilities usually look for temporary hiring through an allied health professionals agency, considering the cost-effectiveness. This blog will help you dive deep into the ways cross-training can be performed, how it can benefit your facility, and how MedSquirrels can help you hire well-trained healthcare providers under your budget!

How can you facilitate the cross-training of allied health professionals?

Cross-training strategies can be implemented based on a range of factors, such as the hospital setting, patient volume, inpatient facilities, and technologies available. Normally, there are two ways in which the facilities cross-train their allied healthcare professionals, such as:

Cross-unit training – In this approach, allied healthcare professionals are proactively trained to work in various functional units in hospital settings like critical care, surgery assistance, ventilator support, and telemetry, where skilled resources are scarce to meet the workload demands. 

Cross-specialization training – This approach focuses on reducing staff burnout and addressing high patient volumes. The staff are cross-trained to work across inpatient and outpatient settings, as well as in specialized areas such as oncology, cardiology, pediatrics, geriatrics, and more.

How does the cross-training of allied health professionals benefit facilities?

Address staff gaps:
A major concern by most healthcare facilities lies in addressing the huge staff gap to cope with the rising cases of chronic diseases among patients seeking hospital care. An increased turnover rate due to staff burnout is observed among the allied healthcare professionals working in healthcare facilities in the USA. However, with the cross-training strategies, staff are enabled to rotate shifts and take time off based on workload demands since there are other cross-trained staff to extend help. This helps the facilities not only enhance staff retention but also helps mitigate staffing shortages, ensuring continuity of care for patients.

Increased team collaboration: Cross-training is the best way for your existing and newly hired allied health professionals to gain a deeper understanding of the operational challenges across various departments. By understanding the challenges in the functioning of a department, collective strategies can be built by the collaboration of professionals from various domains of expertise to address the challenge and optimize patient care delivery. This helps the facilities smoothen their operations and can have a more cohesive and happier workforce.

Agile workforce: During periods of high patient volume, such as during pandemics like COVID-19 or due to unexpected emergencies, there might be a shortage of skilled professionals to address the patient demand. In such cases, the cross-trained staff can adapt to flexibly work in different departments to deliver efficient patient care.  This agile process reduces the downtime caused by staff shortages or the need to hire allied health professionals temporarily via the allied health recruiters, ensuring that the essential duties are performed promptly. 

Adherence to standards and protocols: Cross-training ensures that all staff members are familiar with hospital policies, standards, and best practices across different departments. This consistency helps reduce incidents related to medical errors or non-adherence to hospital policies and best practices within critical departments. Thus, cross-training enhances the overall quality and safety of patient care, thereby fostering long-term patient relationships. Moreover, this structured approach improves the overall operational efficiency of the healthcare facilities. 

Cost savings on recruitment: A major part of the operational costs associated with healthcare facilities are in recruitment, even if they are associated with an allied health professionals agency. According to the quits levels and rates data by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, it is noted that 501,000 quits happened among healthcare workers in February 2024 and has increased to 543,000 quits in just 2 months. Due to this, an average hospital will have to spend millions on costs related to turnover, which include the complete hiring expenses, termination costs, and costs incurred to fill these roles. With cross-training, hospitals can optimize their existing staff, reducing the need to hire allied health professionals. This helps in better resource allocation and proactively saves costs. 

Key things to note while cross-training your existing staff

Even though cross-training is an effective strategy for your healthcare facility, certain things need to be kept in mind throughout the process of cross-training your existing allied health professionals.

• Identify the functions or departments that require cross-training.
• Figure out whether cross-unit training or cross-specialization training is essential based on your facility’s needs.
• Define clear career progression paths of your existing staff to avoid misperceptions.
• Establish a supportive environment and provide opportunities to apply the newly learned skills.
• Assess how the cross-training has improved the skillsets of the workers before deploying them to work in that area.
• Take feedback and monitor the progress of the cross-trained staff.

Bottomline: Should you hire well-trained allied health professionals?

While cross-training offers a lot of benefits in the advancing healthcare sector, it cannot be as effective as mentioned above if you are relying solely on cross-training your existing staff to cut short the recruitment costs. This could potentially overburden current employees to have an impression of increased workload without proportional adjustments to their pay scale. A significant thing to note regarding healthcare staffing is that when you hire allied health professionals through allied health recruiters, there are a lot of middle layers, and a substantial portion of the hired workforce’s salary goes to them, leading to compensation below market standard. To avoid this, MedSquirrels has come up with a hiring platform where you only pay a flat fee, without any bloated markups or fees, for the service that you avail yourself of. 

MedSquirrels is an all-in-one HR platform leveraging technology to optimize your allied healthcare staffing requirements, whether permanent or temporary. We are different from other allied healthcare recruiters in the USA in terms of our flat-fee-based model, which provides complete transparency on the payment incurred for each solution as well as the processing stages. MedSquirrels eliminates multiple middle layers of service providers existing within the traditional staffing agencies. Based on the plan you select with us, we will help you find well-qualified candidates, interview and onboard them with detailed credentialing, take care of payrolling, and do a complete compliance check. To get guidance on how MedSquirrels can be the best allied health recruiter for your facility, book a demo today.