Innovative Initiatives Improving Retention and Recruitment Baptist Health’s efforts to reduce the overall system turnover rate, improve recruitment metrics, and reduce staff vacancy rates found great success in 2023 thanks to a lot of work by teams and committees implementing innovative ideas to address staffing issues in a post-pandemic health care world. The primary goals for 2023 included providing adequate staffing at the bedside and other key positions, reducing external travel staffing needs, improving employee retention and turnover, and conducting an employee experience survey to achieve a baseline score with resulting action plans. During the pandemic, Baptist Health, like other hospitals and health systems across the country, experienced an attrition of bedside caregivers who chose to leave the bedside in favor of other areas of care outside the hospital setting that were perceived as having a lower risk of exposure. Recruiting staff back to the bedside has been an important mission coming out of the pandemic, and Baptist Health has used a targeted approach with multiple strategies to address the need. Retention of employees was also a top priority because successful recruitment of new employees will not provide adequate solutions without retaining the existing staff. Baptist Health conducted an extensive review of market salaries as part of a new strategy to position the system as a salary leader for nursing and other allied health positions such as radiology. To successfully recruit, Baptist Health needed to pay in the upper range of the market rather than past approaches to pay closer to the middle. This aggressive pay strategy was packaged with new advancement ladders to show nurses working in the units not only how they can advance their careers but also earn additional certifications and receive bonuses. The 5% pay increase across the board to all employees to kick off 2023 was icing on the
cake to continue to lead the market for nurses. This momentum in retaining and recruiting staff in 2023 in turn allowed Baptist Health to reduce the reliance on traveling nurses, whose use skyrocketed at hospitals across the country during the pandemic to address staffing shortages. Recognizing that some nurses and other caregivers want traveling positions, and to capitalize on that pool of caregivers, Baptist Health created an innovative internal travel pool in which nurses, radiology techs, and respiratory therapists, for example, could take advantage of traveling within the system rather than staying at one hospital. These positions are contracted employees just like an external travel company but are paid a premium in return for Baptist Health to send them to whatever campus or area is in greatest need. This has enabled Baptist Health to recruit a new, mobile workforce that is ready to be in North Little Rock one day and Conway the next if the need arises. Another key recruitment initiative that is paying off has been new scholarship options at Baptist Health College Little Rock. One popular scholarship program pays for a student’s education if the student pays for the first semester and then commits to working for Baptist Health for two to three years after graduation. Another program offered to senior students, Senior Assistance, was changed in 2023. The program provides financial help to students in their last semester of school. This program has allowed Baptist Health to target areas with large vacancies by offering the assistance to seniors who agree to work in areas where there is a larger staffing need for a commitment to Baptist Health. A new and amazing program for Baptist Health has been the Reach for the Stars scholarship program through the Baptist Health Foundation, which is available exclusively to Baptist Health employees with 11
