The pandemic – and the persistent nurse staffing challenges that have come with it – have hit long-term care harder than most industries.
As more than a half million nurses have left long-term care since 2020, wage rates have skyrocketed in response to the constrained supply. Yet, reimbursement has remained stagnant, leaving facilities desperate for full-time staff and for wage rates to return to pre-pandemic norms.
With higher wages as the new normal, and nearly half of the long-term care nursing workforce looking to make a permanent change to a flexible role, how can your facility respond? What do you need to do to get the staff needed to take on referrals, improve quality of care, and drive more revenue and reimbursement?
The answer is simple: utilize the right technology to build and manage a more balanced workforce.
Planning the Perfect Nurse Staffing Mix
While you have little control over nursing wage rates and reimbursement, you can control the mix of full-time, part-time, float pool, and per diem staff that you use. And therefore, control staffing levels and better manage costs by planning ahead.
The inability to control and manage the costs of per diem nurses can cause a lot of anxiety. And with the government adding regulations and becoming more punitive – without providing more reimbursement – the pressure on long-term care is mounting.
So, how do you create a nurse staffing mix that empowers you with more control over the cost, training, and quality of care provided by the nurses in your building? The first step is to build a nursing float pool to set up your own in-house, flexible workforce that you hire and manage directly, and to use that to supplement your full-time staff and your per diem needs
By offering flexible staffing to nurses who want it, you can attract and retain more staff and reduce per diem use, allowing you to increase the control of your workforce to over 90%.
Will IntelyCare Really Help Us Reduce Agency Use?
IntelyCare is a workforce management provider, and our goal has always been to enable our clients to achieve their staffing goals with our technology – even if it means reducing per diem usage. Why? Because we’re only as successful as our clients.
There will always be a need for per diem to fill in gaps in your schedule with juggling vacations, holidays, kids going back to school, and seasonal sickness as a reality of managing a full-time staff. The key to filling those gaps for your patients and managing costs is making those needs more predictable and balanced. Quickly reacting to predictable staff absences instead of planning for them as part of your long-term strategy is more expensive. If you can appropriately harness the use of per diem as a complement to your full-time and float pool staff, you can more easily avoid burst costs, maintain consistent nurse staffing levels in your facilities, and reduce the anxiety of complying with evolving CMS regulations.
If you’ve had a painful float pool experience in the past, don’t worry, we can help. IntelyCare’s platform lets you eliminate silos by creating a central nursing float pool, make more informed scheduling decisions with our predictive algorithms, and better manage staffing costs with intelligent incentives to help you stay within your budget and optimize for maximum fill.
Talk with IntelyCare today to learn how you can build an optimal staffing mix that puts you in control of over 90% of your workforce. With our technology at your fingertips, you can create and manage a nursing float pool that will supplement your full-time staff and reduce the use of per diem in your staffing mix to under 10%.