Workforce planning crucial to physician recruitment
Healthcare organizations may not pay attention to a recruitment report geared to recruiters, but there are insights to be gleaned from the Association of Staff Physician Recruiters’ (ASPR) 2011 In-House Physician Recruitment Benchmarking Report. Most important? Focus on workforce planning.
ASPR’s benchmarking report found that typical organizations lost four physicians during 2010, or about six percent. The median search to fill open physician positions lasted 115 days, usually involved four applicants, two interviews and one offer. The median search cost was about $2,800, which includes cost of travel, lodging, meals, entertainment, advertising and search firm fees.
Family medicine was the specialty for which most searches were performed in 2010, and it took 150 days to fill those positions.
To gain a competitive edge, organizations must focus on workforce planning said Shelley Tudor, a physician recruiter with St. Francis Medical Group in Indiana and the chair of ASPR’s Benchmarking Committee.
Workforce planning means being savvy about predictable staffing needs, like being aware of who will soon retire, and addressing internal culture issues.
“There are very few positions that are going to be open that you can’t predict,” Tudor said. “Hospitals don’t just go out and say ‘We’re going to build a new neuroscience wing and open it tomorrow.’ They don’t do that. That’s a five-year planning process. I think in the past physicians that are going to populate that wing may have been an afterthought. With the physician shortage that we’re in the midst of … we have to start thinking about those manpower needs in advance, at the beginning of those planning stages.”
“All healthcare organizations that want to be successful in recruiting physicians really need to start with a good foundation,” she said. “They want to make sure they have an organization where doctors want to work. They want to make sure an opportunity is structured, it’s there but it’s flexible for the right candidate, and you want to make sure you want to have good relationships with the medical staff and identify any dissatisfiers that may exist in advance before you go out and look for the perfect doctor to stick in a terrible (work environment).”
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Addressing internal culture issues is imperative, Tudor stressed. “The corporate culture drives physician decision much more so than compensation does. Don’t get me wrong, you’re not going to be able to pay them peanuts, but if you’ve got a great job, $10,000 on this side or that is not going to make much of a difference to a physician who is really committed to his profession.”
Resolving cultural issues also increases retention and makes organizations more desirable to recruits, Tudor said. “If your physicians are happy, it’s going to be much easier to recruit … but you also don’t have to deal with the problem of turnover, so making sure you make those connections with the established physicians and you have good relationships there is going to be more important as the years go on.”
Follow HFN associate editor Stephanie Bouchard on Twitter @SBouchardHFN.
