Staffing Shortages in Medical Practices: One Clinician’s Experience

© 2024 HMP Global. All Rights Reserved.
Any views and opinions expressed are those of the author(s) and/or participants and do not necessarily reflect the views, policy, or position of Podiatry Today or HMP Global, their employees, and affiliates.

Barbara Aung, DPM, DABPM, FAPWHc, CWS has been in practice for nearly 30 years and has witnessed various shifts and trends when it comes to staffing in her private office. In this interview, she shares her insights and observations on recent staffing challenges in health care that might impact other podiatrists, as well.

What have you observed in terms of staffing shortages in the health care space?

Dr. Aung shares that the current scenario that she sees began with the onset of COVID-19.

“I think we learned how people wanted to work or didn't want to work,” she notes.

Specifically, she said she began seeing manageable shortages, necessitating staggering patients on the schedule. However, she says this has progressed to seeing staff candidates exhibit a different mindset than they had previously.

“(People) now are making decisions of lifestyle over work style,” she explains. “And so, we are having difficulty getting new employees.”

She adds that when recruitment is successful, their expectations are different than in the past, resulting in retention concerns. The pool of candidates has just lessened and changed.

Are there any specific actions you’ve taken in your practice to try to mitigate these challenges?

Dr. Aung says she’s noted this trend across multiple practice settings and sizes, and stresses that this is not exclusive to private practice. She said these roadblocks continue despite offering competitive pay and bonuses for staying at least 6 months. This plus offering free training for willing candidates with no experience did not yield significant results, she shares.

Instead, her practice had to function with 2 medical assistants compared to the 3 she had pre-COVID-19. Additionally, in the past year, she reduced this down to a single medical assistant. She shares that this became rather difficult as far as answering phones, helping patients, and scheduling surgeries, among other tasks. She says she sought out answering services, but ran into challenges with integrating this into her electronic medical record. Now she outsources to a virtual assistance company with an assistant based in the Philippines.

“We had to train her to answer the calls the way we wanted, how to ask for insurance information and to learn our EMR and be able to schedule,” she says.

After a little over 3 months, this assistant now does some insurance verifications. Dr. Aung plans to continue to add on to this person’s tasks where appropriate.

“There's a lot of things in a medical office that can be done in the background and you don't necessarily have to be sitting in the office to do it,” she elaborates.

“So those are the kind of tasks that now we're kind of assigning to her and the one person I have in the office now just assists me when I'm seeing patients, and then on days that I'm in surgery she's partly off, scheduling other surgeries and things like that.”

Despite the relative success of this new arrangement, Dr. Aung shares her concern for backup and cross-training in the event of her in-person employee being absent. Accordingly, she is seeking a possible part-time candidate that can fill in for these situations. 

What steps do you recommend other DPMs might take to keep patient care moving smoothly and effectively if they experience these kinds of staff shortages?

Dr. Aung advocates for going in with open eyes and being proactive. She suggests evaluating sustainable scheduling practices that keep these shortages in mind.

“I know that we all think that we have to see so many people because we have to have that revenue going,” she says. “I find that when we slow down a little bit, actually our revenues have gone up because we now have a little bit of extra time to go through additional patient concerns (per visit).”

She notes that she is pleased that this allows her to provide even more, comprehensive care to patients, but that she is also happy with the additional revenue potential at the same time.  

“Whatever resources you have, you can potentially use them better,” she adds. 

Exploring temp agencies as backup options is also a measure she suggests, especially during finite periods of need like during the interview process. She also contacts local community colleges and medical assisting schools to let them know of available positions. She also shares such news with patients, an action that yielded surprisingly positive results.