Can temporary staffing agencies save you time, money, and aggravation?
Temps can shore up your agency
Whether they are looking to fill a position or simply find temporary staff, health care organizations are turning to recruitment agencies and temporary services for their human resources needs. Once the bastion of secretarial pools and day laborers, staffing agencies have found a lucrative niche within health care, especially now that so many health care companies find themselves strapped for cash in the face of increasingly tight reimbursement purse strings.
So if you’ve ever wished for an easier means of handling your human resource issues, staffing agencies may be an answer to at least one of your problems.
Temporary staffing allows home health agencies to stay afloat in spite of the changes in Medicare reimbursement policies, explains Vicki Stinnette, a professional recruiter with RTTemps-RNTemps in Salem, VA.
"If I were running a home health agency, I would be asking myself how I could maintain operations without having all these fixed costs. I may have a certain level of work that’s always there, but at peak times, I need to bring in additional staff to help me through," she says, pointing out the difficulty and folly of interviewing and hiring someone an agency will only need for a short time.
"Temporary staffing then is a very viable option and probably a preferable one as far as agencies having to carry full-time staff vs. being able to flex their numbers up and down depending on their need," she adds.
It’s nice to know that if half your staff suddenly disappears tomorrow, there would be ways to continue on, and in many cases, to do so seamlessly. Randall Wilson, accounts manager for Seattle-based Maxim Healthcare Services, notes, "We build on the agency’s charts and information and want to provide good service just like the home health agency. We want to be an extension of their home care component. We don’t want our nurses saying they’re Maxim nurses. It should be a seamless change. After all, we are catering to our client, the home health agency, and want to provide them with what they want."
Continuity of care is a vital component of home care, not just with the type and quality of care being provided but with a personal touch as well. It can be hard for patients, especially those who have grown close to their caregiver and are then faced with that employee’s lengthy absence, to bond with another nurse. Staffing agencies realize this, says Stinnette, and if possible, are usually eager to provide that constancy of care.
"Within a particular geographical area," she says, "you could probably work it so that you have cultivated a pool of temporary staffers. If a relationship develops between the staffing and home health agencies, you could call and say, We really need Sue’ rather than just anyone. That’s the kind of long-term relationship we like to develop, too, because it gives our staff a sense of continuity."
See how they work
Agencies such as Stinnette’s operate on the same principles as any other staffing service in that they have a pool of qualified, available workers ready to fill in at a moment’s notice for a nurse who has had, for example, a family emergency and can’t make her shift. As a rule of thumb, Stinnette says she likes to have a little notice when placing home health employees so that she can better match the client agency’s needs.
She points out that between her company’s two branches — RTTemps and RNTemps — a wide range of health care professionals are available: medical imaging, radiation oncology, medical physics, all rehab professions such as physical and respiratory therapy, registered nurses, LVNs and LPNs, certified nursing assistants, surgical technologists, and all nursing specialties. Usually, an agency will call looking for critical care nurses or IV therapy nurses and will ask Stinnette what her agency has to offer, she says.
Other staffing agencies follow basically the same initial procedures whereby the temporary employment agency records the client’s vital statistics such as name and address, what the client is looking for, and when it will need the nurses and for how long. This information, says Stinnette, becomes part of the client’s profile. Once this is completed, the staffing agency faxes the client its own company information, as well as a sample contract. Stinnette adds that her firm includes a letter explaining its staffing and hiring procedures.
After searching her temporary-help database, Stinnette forwards copies of potential candidates’ resumes to the home health agency. "If that person is local to them, they could interview the person over the phone or in person." She explains that this is something she would encourage any agency to do, especially if hiring long-term temporary help.
Stinnette says her agency receives hundreds of resumes that must each be sorted and closely examined to determine if the person is a suitable candidate.
When it comes to filling vacancies, the more time the better, says Stinnette, who readily acknowledges that the very nature of the business lends itself to short-notice staffing needs. In such cases, she says, "We follow all the steps. We just do it a lot faster." For this reason, she says recruiters such as herself are "always tracking in their minds where people are and what clients’ needs are. It’s like matching the pieces of a giant puzzle."
Wilson is used to finding temporary staff on short notice. "It’s the nature of the beast," he says, "where you have a 12-hour shift the next day and that primary caregiver calls in at midnight to say she won’t be able to make it. Now the agency can scramble to find someone and exhaust themselves and their resources, or they can call someone like us."
Quick staffing comes with a bit of a caveat, he says, noting that the more technical positions, such as nurses required to fill in with "high-tech pediatric cases," are more difficult to staff. Wilson adds, however, that his Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations-accredited agency has hiring practices similar to hospital home health agencies.
"With these cases we have a special interest in developing a strong clinical understanding where we consult with the doctors, but even so, it’s not always enough." In these instances, Wilson notes that it is at "the discretion of the agency that owns the case" as to whether temporary help will be brought in.
Once a decision has been made to hire, contracts are signed, and whereas some agencies require that their employees work for a long block of time, neither Stinnette’s nor Wilson’s agency have any such restrictions. They do require that their nurses are hired for eight- and four-hour shifts, respectively. "The caregivers themselves won’t work less than that," says Wilson.
Workers’ compensation insurance and the like are covered by the staffing agency, making long-term temporary staff an attractive option for home health agencies experiencing growing pains. "If someone drops a dish at a home, that’s covered. If one of our staff breaks an appliance or falls down and breaks an ankle, it’s covered under our policy," says Wilson.
Despite the seemingly boundless advantages in temporary staffing, not everyone is so quick to jump on the bandwagon. Greg Solecki, vice president of Detroit-based Henry Ford Home Health Care, is a bit leery of using temporary staff at Henry Ford, saying that they "have found it to be a more successful endeavor when we have our own staff.
"Because of the fact that we have people working out in the community rather than in the four walls of an institution," he continues, "communication is one of the greatest barriers we in home care face. So in order for us to stay on top of things so that don’t appear to be fraudulent or incompetent, it’s very important that we have staff with whom we can communicate on a regular basis. When you’re trying to succeed in an extremely paper-intensive and over-regulated industry such as home care, we have found that training, and teaching, and being part of a company culture is an important variable."
Solecki says he doesn’t know of too many home health agencies, at least not in his market area or who are provider-affiliated, that are using temporary staffing agencies. He chalks this up to industry paranoia, noting that "if you make a mistake and hire the wrong [temporary] person through the wrong agency, the public relations impact is not as potentially devastating for smaller independent agencies as for health care systems where it makes for bigger news."
This industrywide fear has prompted many home health care agencies, Henry Ford among them, to conduct in-depth background and reference checks, a process Solecki prefers that his agency carry out. "We like to talk to the people we hire first to get an intuitive sense of what they’re about before bringing them into our culture." And whereas hiring rules vary from agency to agency, he sees system-based home care agencies as being more stringent because of larger corporate issues (such as ensuring companywide consistency) that must be dealt with.
Even so, Solecki says he would never think badly of an agency that uses temporary help, provided their reference and background check criteria were stringent. "My perspective is from that of a large urban delivery system," he admits. "Temporary staffing might be the way to go in rural markets and depending on the types of employment barriers you have to face."
While not suitable for all home health agencies and under every condition, there are certainly times when it pays to go temporary. Stinnette adds, "Outsourcing is the key word for 90s and this gives home health agencies the opportunity to outsource a big expenditure. They get all benefits of having employees but with none of the hassle of dealing with any of the human resource and insurance issues."
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