Huron Perth Healthcare Alliance Board Brought Up To Date on Recruitment and Retention Situation

by Bob Montgomery

The Director of Human Resources and Environmental Services brought members of the Huron Perth Healthcare Alliance board up to date on Recruitment and Retention strategies at their last meeting.

Adam Hahn says the Alliance is experiencing higher turnover, in particular after employees have put in one year or after ninety days. He says they're looking at improving their exit survey as one way to help address the turnover. But he adds he is encouraged by a decrease in the number of job postings, and their hires are currently exceeding their departures.

Hahn says the Alliance is not alone in dealing with staff shortages. “There's simply a lack of labour supply out there and everybody's competing fiercely for what is available.” Hahn says employees also know they can move from one job to another fairly easily. “Your commitment's pretty limited. I think that's why you're seeing a lot of one year turnover, you can grab something that's a better location, you don't have a lot of seniority built up at that point.”

At this point they're still gathering data that will help them make decisions about how to address the problem. “Where is the turnover occurring, what type of employee is leaving, is it full time, part time or casual, are there particular departments that are seeing higher turnover than others and then what are we seeing in the exit interview, what are they saying are the reasons for their departure.” He says at this point it would be a little premature to talk about solutions.

One of the problems they have is that hospitals in larger urban centres want people with experience, so people will take a job at a hospital like St. Marys, because it's close to London, and once they've been there for a year or so they can move to a job in London. He also points out that it takes a special kind of person to be happy working in a smaller, rural hospital and that's something that's very difficult to pick up in one job interview. With the job pool as shallow as it is, you tend to take anyone who qualifies and then maybe find out later that person would be happy in an urban hospital.