Page 5 - Healthcare News Jan/Feb 2023

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“It will be challenging to persist with the current models that are in place in the same ways that we have in the past,” Roose went on. There are a multitude of reasons for that, but the challenges remain significant, and the pathways forward are going to require multiple initiatives and ongoing support from a variety of different angles.
Dr. Lynette Watkins, president and CEO of Cooley Dickinson Hospital, an affiliate of Mass General Brigham, agreed, noting that COVID put the chal- lenges that all hospitals are facing under a brighter spotlight.
“The past three years have been particularly challenging,” she said, citing everything from staffing issues to the aging of the population and the pres- sures they put on hospitals. “What COVID laid bare is that all of these issues are there, and that it’s incumbent on us to be creative, accelerate the solu-
“What COVID laid bare is that
all of these issues are there,
and that it’s incumbent on us
to be creative, accelerate the solutions, and leverage a lot
of the tools that we were in
many ways reticent to use,
such as telehealth and virtual visits.”
tions, and leverage a lot of the tools that we were in many ways reticent to use, such as telehealth and virtual visits.
“While this situation has challenged us, it has also provided us with an opportunity to think differently, to treat patients differently, to engage differ- ently — with our patients and with the community,” Watkins went on, adding that she and her team at CDH are working to taking full advantage of that opportunity.
Spiras Hatiras, president and CEO on Holyoke Medical Center (HMC), concurred. In remarks made to HCN’s sister publication, BusinessWest, for its annual Economic Outlook, he spoke of both challenge and opportunity, on several fronts, but especially when it comes to workforce issues.
The ongoing workforce crisis, while it has impacted all sectors, has put healthcare providers, and especially hospitals, at an extreme disadvantage, es- pecially when it comes to nursing and the need to fill vacancies with contract or ‘travel’ nurses, which can cost two or three times what a staff nurse might, Hatiras noted.
“In healthcare, there is a great deal of concern, and the most concerning part is the continuing shortage of personnel, which has created this market for temporary staffing at rates that are truly outrageous,” he said. “To put things in perspective, we have about 20 nurses on temporary staff that we get through agencies. Those 20 nurses, on an annual basis, cost us $5 million; each nurse costs us $250,000 because the rates are exorbitant — the nurses get a lot of money, but there’s also a middleman that makes untold amounts of money from this crisis.
“As a nation, the federal government is doing a lot of things — they did some things with railroad workers, they’re helping Ukraine, they’re talking about a lot of things. They should have stepped in and regulated this and said, ‘the pandemic created a tremendous amount of shortage; we cannot allow private companies to go out and profit from that shortage of staffing and bring hospitals to their knees.’ With all this, it’s going to be very difficult for hospitals to cope, and that’s why all our strategy centers around finding a way to attract nurses here.”
For this issue, HCN takes an in-depth look at the fiscal challenges facing hospitals today, and what must happen for these institutions to weather this severe storm.
Please see Hospitals, page 7
DR. LYNETTE WATKINS