Page 7 - Healthcare News Nov/Dec 2021

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Workforce
Continued from page 5
just an hour here and an hour there. These were people with 24-hour needs.”
The government’s generous unemployment poli- “ cies didn’t help, she added.
If you’re getting paid $15 or $16 an hour to potentially expose yourself to COVID by entering someone’s home, why not stay home and get paid $25 an hour
to stay home? We had the same issues every other industry had: the government simply made it way
too easy to stay home.”
“When the government pays you to stay home, why the hell would you go to work? If you’re getting paid $15 or $16 an hour to potentially expose yourself to COVID by entering someone’s home, why not stay home and get paid $25 an hour to stay home? We had the same issues every other industry had: the govern- ment simply made it way too easy to stay home.”
All that became what Flahive-Dickson called a
“perfect storm” of increased home-care needs when the worker pool was dramatically shrinking — a simple matter of supply and demand, really. She un- derstands the reluctance to work last year — not just because of the unemployment benefits, but because it was unclear, especially early on, how COVID spread and how serious the risk was. But almost two years after the pandemic began, the workforce disruption still resonates.
This past year did bring some relief, she noted, from the end of the extra-large unemployment checks to the expedited vaccine rollout to healthcare workers in February and March. However, the tight labor
Mary Flahive- Dickson
says many people want to remain in healthcare, but not in acute-care settings because of stress and burnout.
market has also created a competitive situation in which nurses, certified nursing assistants (CNAs), home health aides, and others are willing to jump from job to job for a pay bump — and companies are, indeed, offering those bumps.
“If I work for company A and company B offers me a quarter more an hour, I’m going to company B,” she said in explaining the mindset. “Then, if company C offers more than company B, I’m going to company C. Competition for home-care workers and other healthcare workers is through the roof.
“The reimbursements haven’t gone up, but payouts have gone up,” she went on. “A lot of companies are