A recent article from McKinsey Quarterly discusses how most health systems lack a rigorous approach for matching clinician supply to the demand for various health services. As a result, patient care and clinician morale suffer—and costs cannot be controlled effectively. Essentially they discuss the need for better workforce planning:
“Few health care systems forecast their workforce demands accurately. Predicting the number of doctors who will be needed in ten years’ time isn’t enough; it’s also necessary to figure out how many general practitioners, specialists, nurses, and allied health professionals will be required. The length of clinical training only compounds the problem.” – McKinsey, Managing The Clinical Workforce
We concur with McKinsey’s recommendations and have added a few of our own from the work we do with our clients.
Our collective suggestions on creating proper workforce planning and staffing optimization structures include:
- Forecasting: Begin with accurate forecasting focused on demand of services by job clusters. What types of jobs does the system need– now, next year, and the year after? What types of jobs will need to be refilled or created based on market needs and system growth plans? Work with finance to get accurate budget projections – this should be something you do every year at the beginning of your fiscal cycle and at least once during the fiscal year to track changes.
- Determine Baseline Demand: For each job category, determine your baseline demand. This would be a charting of hiring needs for at least the past year, ideally two years, by job family. Again this would involve working with finance to map the potential needs over time. You can also look at actual hires made month to month for the last year or two to get a sense of the fluctuations.
- Forecast Changes in Demand: Map potential changes in hiring demand based on various factors, including demographic changes, retiring workers, consumer expectations, medical innovations, policy shifts, or productivity improvements. Career progression and job movement internally are also factors.
- Scenario Analyses: Project various areas of impact to your model based on the aforementioned factors. Here you get to play with the “what if” scenarios – a spike in hiring in Q2, a dramatic slowdown in August, etc. The Scenario analysis will prepare you for these fluctuations and changes so you can be more proactive.
These are simple outlines of concepts, which of course have much more depth. In a future post or whitepaper we’ll delve into workforce planning in more detail.
If you’d like to learn more about how we approach workforce planning and staffing optimization, and the benefits they could provide to your system contact me.