The Key to Successfully Redeploying Staff

Blog Written by: Roger Lee

The demands and challenges facing healthcare continue to increase. Responding to constantly changing priorities and shifting needs adds to the complexity of an already hectic environment. This inevitably puts more pressure on the system, and places greater constraints on already limited resources when trying to support and treat patients with the highest quality of care.

One of the best strategies available to healthcare organizations is to move existing staff to areas and departments where they are most needed.

Particularly in response to the COVID pandemic, more and more organizations started upskilling and redeploying staff from service lines with higher capacity to areas of lower capacity.  “On a daily basis within our hospitals we’re constantly making adjustments,” Hartford HealthCare CEO Jeffrey Flaks said. “Some places where we move COVID patients, when we open up different units, when we expand different units. There’s a whole series of levels of plans we have in place depending on what the needs are.” (Hartford Courant, 12/08/2020)

A common major key to successful staff redeployment is Access to Training

• Northwell Health's North Shore University Hospital in Manhasset, New York, leveraged Zoom calls to deliver live refresher courses. (Health Leaders, 06/02/2020)
• Gundersen Health System in La Crosse, WI employed listservs to help answer questions in real-time along with centralizing digital access to videos and other supplemental training. (Advisory Board, 04/2020)
• At NYC Health + Hospitals “Over the course of three days, the team designed and deployed a tool that automated the onboarding process, enabling new staff members and volunteers to be deployed within forty-eight hours of submitting completed applications” (Health Affairs, 06/11/2020)
• In Hanover, Germany, a digital training platform was deployed in a matter of days for a makeshift clinic, so that “employees can now prepare for their possible tasks there and stay up to date with subsequent refresher training courses.” (Hanover State Website, 04/29/2020)

This is a trend that will continue into the future domestically and globally.

To effectively react to anything that can happen in the future keep these three fundamental approaches in the forefront:

1. Flexibility
2. Communication
3. Technology

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