Work in Progress
Hospitals Turn to Gig Work, Non-Medical Staff to Fill Nursing Shortage
Care facilities are rethinking and reorganizing the job of registered nurses.
Source: Getty Images
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Hospitals, scrambling to fill vacancies after departures of nurses and other caregivers during the pandemic, are looking to new places and methods to hire help — including warehouse workers and their own non-medical staff — and creating shorter, gig-work shifts.
“Everyone realizes that we’re on the precipice of a major cliff,” said Greg Till, chief people officer at the Renton, Washington-based Providence health system, which operates 51 hospitals and 1,000 clinics in the western US. “There’s no way that we’re going to be able to build a workforce that’s large enough to take care of the population.”