Health-care employers face tough time finding qualified workers

Health-care providers continue to 

struggle to find skilled candidates 

or job openings, particularly specialized, technical positions. 

More than 37 percent of health-care employers have jobs open for which they cannot find the right talent, according to a new study from MiracleWorkers.com, a jobs website for health-care professionals.

The study, which surveyed 358 health-care hiring managers and human-resources professionals in the U.S., shows that 34 percent of health-care employers will offer higher starting salaries to new employees in 2012. The study also indicates that 64 percent of existing employees will also see their salaries rise this year. For jobs that are tough to fill –– typically high-skilled or high-demand positions –– wages traditionally go up, according to MiracleWorkers.com.

Linda Steele, managing director at Comforce Staffing Services, an employee-placement and staffing firm in Syracuse, says local health-care providers are increasingly having a hard time filling positions such as nurse practitioners, physicians’ assistants, physical therapists, and medical technicians.

“There’s no shortage of openings for them. Physical therapy is just going to grow and grow as our population ages. And as the population ages and our nurses are retiring, we need more nurses,” says Steele. “Physical therapists, occupational therapists, anyone with psychiatric experience, whether it’s psychiatrist or psychiatric nurse practitioner, the field is growing. So more openings, more need.”

Steele says that more medical practices are hiring for mid-level positions like nurse practitioners and physicians’ assistants because they can see more patients and improve the medical practice’s bottom line. Comforce, founded in 1961, provided services to 65 health-care clients last year. The company helps fill positions including physicians’ assistants, nurse practitioners, medical coders, medical assistants, medical receptionists, and clinic personnel.

The study by MiracleWorkers.com, a division of CareerBuilder, provides a list of the most in-demand health-care positions currently, including critical-care nurses, surgical technologists, radiological technologists, diagnostic medical sonographers, and occupational health and safety specialists.

Steele believes that local health-care providers will continue to face pressure filling positions because the talent is going elsewhere.

“I think maybe more people are going into the field, but they are not coming to Central New York,” she says. “We need to attract and retain physical therapists and psychiatric health-care workers.”

Steele says health-care employers have to boost starting salaries to attract more new employees, especially physical therapists and anything in the psychiatric field. She also says more employers should offer signing bonuses for these harder-to-find skill sets.

Like Steele, Joseph Papa, CEO of American Medical Personnel Services, also finds it hard to get highly skilled and dedicated individuals to take mid-level medical positions. He sees shortages in family-practice physicians, physicians’ assistants, and nurse practitioners for primary care.

American Medical Personnel Services is a Syracuse–based staffing company that provides qualified health-care personnel for clinical and management positions. Papa has more than 30 years of experience in this field.

Papa believes these mid-level positions have become harder to fill because people have little incentive to go into a profession where there is no possibility of increasing their pay over a period of years to come.

“Primary care doesn’t pay what a surgeon gets to go up in an operating room to do a surgery, so you are going to see fewer and fewer individuals going into primary care,” he says. “The reimbursements aren’t there and they can’t make the living that others are making in different disciplines.”

Lindsay Drake, operations manager at Pro-Tel People Staffing Solutions in Norwich — a staffing firm that has a placement specialty in medical — says she also finds her clients having difficulty finding skilled and experience candidates.

“Every time I meet with a potential customer, the biggest hiring challenge is finding the individual that’s skilled,” says Drake.

However, Drake says more health-care administrators are taking steps to deal with the hiring challenge. She says she sees more health-care providers investing in training and development, specifically on-the-job training to try to get the newer nursing students or doctors job-specific experience.

Drake contends that the potential for the local health-care talent pool is good since every college in Central New York offers a nursing program or a medical program.

She says many health-care providers in the area such as United Health Services and Upstate University Hospital have put training-and-development programs in place to further train the less-experienced nurses and doctors or physical therapists in their
procedures. This will eventually aid job-placement efforts.

In the meantime, the struggle to find qualified workers continues for local health-care providers and their staffing-agency partners.