Why should you hire an agency to fill allied healthcare staffing gaps?
Allied healthcare professionals are specialized clinical support providers who work alongside doctors and nurses for optimized patient care delivery. Physical therapists, radiologists, medical laboratory technologists, speech therapists, audiologists, and medical assistants are some of the allied healthcare professionals in demand in the USA. They work across diverse healthcare settings, including hospitals, specialized clinics, and rehabilitation centers.
Due to various challenging factors in the healthcare sector, specifically after the COVID-19 outbreak, the demand for allied healthcare staff has increased tremendously. This demand is mainly due to staff shortages due to burnout issues and the increasing healthcare needs for the aging baby boomer generations. National Center for Health Workforce Analysis projects staff shortages in many key allied healthcare roles, including physical therapists, dispensing opticians, respiratory therapists, and pharmacists, in the upcoming decade.
Allied health professionals are recruited either through permanent hiring or temporary hiring. Both these kinds of hiring processes have their bright sides as well as shortcomings which depend on the specific needs and priorities of your healthcare facility. If you are looking for a way to fill in the seasonal staff demand and save costs associated with it, hiring temporary professionals is the best fit for you. However, if your facility’s focus is on building long-term patient relationships, hiring a permanent staff would be suitable.
The most promising way to meet all your staffing requirements is by collaborating with a reputable staffing agency that can streamline the recruitment process and help you find the right professionals to enhance operational efficiency and deliver exceptional patient care. The blog post effectively argues the benefits of using staffing agencies to address the challenges of allied healthcare professional shortages.
Meeting demand fluctuations
Hiring allied health professionals is instrumental in helping healthcare organizations streamline supply-demand disparities effectively. Demand fluctuations might be due to several reasons ranging from natural calamities, pandemics, unexpected emergencies, or specialized treatment requirements. Allied healthcare staffing agencies collaborate closely with healthcare organizations to understand their specific staffing requirements and operational challenges to aid them in hiring the right talent.
Flexible staffing solutions
Understaffing caused by the lack of skilled specialists will force the existing staff to work overtime, which in turn impairs their well-being. This was found to be one of the major reasons for staff burnout and the increasing turnover rate among healthcare professionals. According to a study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, nearly half of healthcare professionals reported that they often feel burned out. Allied health professionals staffing agencies alleviate this burden by filling adequate allied healthcare staff by assessing the demand. This reduces workload pressures, thereby enabling facilities to foster healthier work conditions and encourage staff retention.
Cost management
One key strategy for efficient cost management is to reduce overtime and overhead costs by supplementing the existing healthcare providers with temporary allied health professionals during busy seasons. The cost of hiring a temporary allied health staff is comparatively low compared to a permanent staff. Here, an additional perk of associating with an allied health professionals staffing agency is the streamlined recruitment process. The agency will be in charge of the end-to-end recruitment process, including sourcing, credentialing, compliance checks, onboarding, and payroll. This helps the facilities to save a lot of time and money spent on the recruitment process.
Enhanced patient care
Allied health professionals come with diverse skills and expertise that focus on either therapeutic or rehabilitation support. This expertise allows healthcare facilities to provide extensive and customized care tailored to individual patient requirements. A prominent benefit of hiring allied health professionals is they reduce medical errors and prevent unfavorable events, thereby enhancing overall patient safety. Moreover, they also aid in the reduction of hospital admissions due to adverse impacts and provide quality treatment with early diagnosis.
Efficient compliance tracking
We know that allied health professionals come with specialized skill sets and certifications. Most of the states in the US have certain regulatory requirements regarding the practice of these professionals. Getting a license from the state of practice is the first step to working as an allied health professional. Also, the scope of work of an allied healthcare professional varies from state to state. Due to these regulations, license renewal, compliance checks, and reviewing the scope of practice are some administrative headaches for most of the facilities. Nevertheless, this can be simplified by associating with an allied healthcare professional staffing agency where all the compliance checks and regulatory management are taken care of.
Let MedSquirrels simplify your allied healthcare professionals hiring needs
There are several allied health professionals staffing agencies in and around the USA. But before associating with one, you need to keep in mind several factors, such as the transparency of the agency, their experience in the domain, cost-effectiveness, easy-to-track software availability, etc. Most of the traditional staffing agencies work via an MSP model where multiple middlemen are involved in the process of recruitment. Hence, this can cause you to spend a major share of your employee’s bill on staffing providers. Eventually, this might cause your staff to get underpaid. To relieve you from these huge charges and markups, you can leverage MedSquirrels’ hiring and payroll platform where you just have to pay a flat fee in addition to the payroll costs for the allied healthcare professional you are hiring. Book a demo today to learn how MedSquirrels can help you with your allied health professional staffing needs.
