1. Enough time in the day to effectively skill market that great candidate you current have nothing to offer that has been sitting on your desk for far too long.

I know that when I ran an agency it always seemed that everything you wanted to do today rarely got completed to satisfy the perfectionist in me.  I found that the distractions, and everything else this industry throws at you, just seemed to take control of most of my days or most of the day.   I had all the best intentions and then you name it would happen and off in that direction I would go.   It was always something worthy of my time and attention but it sure didn’t make it easy to make a to do list and feel confident I had given everything on that list my best effort.

2. Knowing you have done everything possible to get those phones ringing, applications coming and shifts/ contracts being filled.

There always seemed to be something else I could have done to fill an order, find the perfect job or contact the new candidates applying thru the website and every other avenue we were offering at the moment.  My measure of success wasn’t always the number of shifts or new starts per week, sometimes it was everything you did to try to make these things happen.   I think we have all had those weeks or days when you try everything and it still doesn’t make a connection, and then you head to lunch or on your way home and think I should have called so and so or I should have used this approach.   Even though you have a checklist for everything, most times you have delayed 20/20 vision and figure out how to make it work. Often after someone else has made it work and not in your favor. Its okay, it happens, it truly is the game we all wake up to play day after day…

3. Personal 24 hour chauffeur for the candidates that just can’t seem to get to work on time or at all.

How many times have you said do I really need to drive on over to your house and drop you off at the facilities front door.   How can the bus be late 30 minutes every day?   You know you need gas to get to work, make sure you get enough to get through the week, so you can earn more money to pay for next week’s gas.  It happens so often that it doesn’t seem to bother many of us anymore.  We all just shrug and say what do you expect from BLANK BLANK.   And those are the nicer words that come out of your mouth not the words spinning around in your brain.   If I only had a chauffeur to get these people to work, it would be a more pleasant day.

4. Current Decision Makers contact info and the confidence that the services you offer and the talent available are being kept fresh in their minds.

Have you ever been leaving a message for someone you were told was just the person you needed to speak with.  After many attempts you finally reach this person only to be told, I have no idea why someone would tell you to speak to me.  “I have nothing to do with that” or “that is no longer my responsibility so and so is who you need to speak to now”.   Did you ever just wonder why no one ever bothers to tell you this the first time you tried.   Or how hard is it to pass the message along to the person responsible for that task so that your message got to the person who might need to know what you have to say.   What about the employee whose answer is I left her a message last week and she never got back to me.  Is this employee really saying this to me with all sincerity?  “Yes”, I said,” one (1) message a week ago and she is still waiting for a response”  How about the other 5 or so ways of contacting this person.   E-mail, hand written note, call and see if she answers this time (you don’t have to leave a message every time you call).   Try stopping by or having someone associated with you stop by and mention how much you would like to speak to him/her.   What about a fax that says

Dear Kathy,
Please call me as soon as you get a minute.  I have to tell you about- whatever it is that you need to discuss with her.
Sincerely,
Mindi Derry

One phone message and then wait – is this employee silently taunting me, truly begging me to allow her to go work for the competition or anywhere, just not here.

5. Experienced additional staff available on a PRN basis.  

This one takes the cake – why doesn’t anyone offer temps for the temp industry.  We need extra help; maternity coverage, vacation coverage, extra man power on certain days or times of the week / month.   The very service we offer is not available to us in return.   How many times have you thought that if only you could have someone step in and assist the existing staff to get everything done before the end of the day?   We have growing pains just like every one of our illustrious clients.   Our mission carries some importance and has added value at the end of every patient’s day.   Where is our temp for the day/ week?  I know everyone of you reading this has had this same thought, why hasn’t anyone done anything to remedy this obviously too close to home lack of service.  Is it just that, too close to home – no one could possibly step up to the plate and hit a homer for the team of day?   Well that just defeats everything we tell our clients on a daily basis.   Why can we have Nurses making life and death decisions just waltz onto an ICU floor and get the job done effortlessly, like she has been doing this her whole life?  And internally believe no one could possibly help or offer assistance to your team without many hours of training or constant supervision.   It just isn’t humanly possible.   I had to learn the hard way that recruitment and marketing are not brain surgery.   We who have had experience in our chosen field can just sit at a desk and get the job done effortlessly.   It is not brain surgery or caring for a person after brain surgery.
Do you believe in fairy god mothers or fair temp workers?    Holiday Miracles?   There is now a company offering 4 out of 5 solutions to the issues mentioned above.  Sorry, we are not offering personal chauffeur service at this time, but who knows what we will offer next.

Lessons-Learned offers temporary staffing to the healthcare staffing industry.   Experienced healthcare staffing recruiters and marketing sales professionals available to assist you on an hourly or project basis.If you find yourself wishing or being troubled by any of the remaining 4, give us a call and lets build a solution together.     

For more information regarding the services offered by Lessons Learned visit our web site at www.lessons-learned.co or call us anytime you finally have a minute to talk at 615-590-7892. 

Since nothing happens by accident, it is best to plan ahead.   Plan for everything but be prepared for the unexpected.

On a quarterly basis you should plan

How to get the next ten clients – Pick 10 facilities and set up a marketing plan to get their business.

How to get the next  ten candidates out on assignment – Create a plan that best skill markets  the candidates to facilities with and without current contracts.

Know what is going on – Plan to attend conferences, job fairs, association meetings and don’t forget to attend healthcare related events in your territory.   EX:   set up a water booth at a breast cancer walk.

On a daily basis you should plan

I find that if you start with your objective for the day it is easier to decide how to spend the day.

Plan your day the night before – it is best to walk in the door knowing what needs to be done rather than spending the day trying to figure out how to get it done.

Plan daily to make a minimum number of calls – I suggest 80.

Medical Staffing Consultants assists their clients with quarterly and yearly planning.   We are available to train your staff on the art of planning and accomplishing what has been planned.  Please contact us if you have any further questions regarding planning or any other topic you might want assistance with.

www.medstaffsonsultants.com

516-764-5529

1. Planning

Nothing happens by accident.   Plan ahead yearly if possible, quarterly is necessary.

2. Growth

There are two ways to grow.  You can either increase the territory you cover or you can increase the disciplines/specialties within your existing territory.

3. Training

Anyone in your office should be trained to intake a new candidate or take a job order from a client.   If candidates or clients are being sent to Voicemail, you can bet their next call will be to the next agency with an opening posted.

4. Productivity

In any economy, we do not have office/desk space for unproductive employees.   Monitor productivity weekly, evaluate monthly.

5. Objectives

Make sure that all objectives are clear to everyone.  Set individual incremental goals for everyone leading the group to accomplish the companies objectives.

6. Evaluations

Evaluate everything from your processes to the people who perform them

7. Networking

Ask questions of everyone you come in contact with.   Put it out there.

8. Systems and Policies

Is everyone following the same rules of practice?   They need to be.

9. Retention

When you find talented people you need to keep them.   It will cost you more in the long run to replace the candidates and internal staff members.

10. Profitability

It is more than just making profitable placements, what is the magic number that you need from each employee to truly be profitable.

Medical Staffing Consultants has been offering solutions and guidance in all of these aspects of the staffing industry for 10 years to hundreds of start up and existing medical staffing companies.   We look forward to working with you on the any of these topics and more.

Visit our website at www.medicalstaffingconsultants.com, call  800 764-2966 for more information or email us at Info@medstaffconsultants.com

• I know many hospitals are trying to cut costs and maintain patient care.  Have you ever thought about temporary staffing to help relieve some of your hiring pain?
• Do you realize that cutting staff levels will actually cost you more money in the long term?  We actually prescreen and provide testing for our caregivers, would using our quality caregivers be an option to supplement your permanent staff?
• Putting caregivers into overtime can be costly because it is known that over worked caregivers have increased medication errors and other patient safety problems.  Our agency can provide per-diem staff that can alleviate your caregivers from working overtime therefore having better patient care.

Have these conversations with your facilities find out what their plan is for better patient safety and care.  Offer to help them out showing that with your fully credentialed tested and prescreened caregivers this could be a great solution to their problem I promise you no CNO is going to want to work the floor because of low-staff levels.  Give your facilities an answer to their problems – Temporary Staff!!!

Coming out of surgery Aubrey decided she didn’t want to breathe and almost was re-intubated (her surgery only lasted 3 hours she was in recovery for 7 more trying to get stabilized), her eyes were swollen shut, her pain medication wasn’t working, she caught a staph infection and got a bacterial infection Pseudomonas in her urinary tract.  Good news was the surgery was a success the peripheral issues were the hard part.

Through all of this we weren’t sleeping we stayed by her side 24/7…what made it easier?  An incredible nursing staff.  Every nurse that we came in contact with was absolutely in tune with Aubrey’s needs.  One in particular was Kerri.  On Wednesday after surgery, Aubrey was crying and uncomfortable for hours. Kerri fought for Aubrey to get better pain medication….she called in doctor after doctor.  If it wasn’t for her I’m not sure what we would’ve done.  Aubrey ended up crying in pain for 30 hours straight and her only advocate besides us was Kerri.  Every nurse we came in contact with was knowledgeable, honest and prepared.  If they didn’t know they found out.  They were a shoulder to cry on at 2 in the morning when I was walking the halls to get coffee when I had to be awake for my shift with Aubrey, they were an ear to listen when I needed to vent or pray for that matter.  One of our nurses actually prayed over our baby with me.  I never felt more thankful as I did then.

If I never believed in what I do for a living I sure do now.  Our software helps staffing agencies find the very nurses that are helping families go through what my family just went through.  How can I not feel good about that???  If anyone in our industry ever questions what they do they should stop and think about what if this was your baby, your mom, your husband that went through what my child went through.  Nurses, Nurse Techs, and all the support staff in the hospital help families go through hard times.  We are one of the lucky ones, our baby girl is doing great and there is a 98% chance that she’ll never have to have surgery again.  Our ICU neighbor is still in the hospital over a month later and is relying on the staff to get him through.  I credit everyone that helped us their knowledge and bed side manor was incredible.

If you’d like to hear more about our story and what we went through you can check out our Caring Bridge Site www.caringbridge.org/visit/aubreysevers.  The people that you place aren’t just a dollar sign they are affecting someones life.  What you do matters and it matters to families like mine.

Many young people harbor ambitions of making a difference when they grow up. These ambitions usually extend to helping solve the world’s problems or, on a smaller scale, helping other individuals. Becoming a doctor certainly fulfills the latter ambition, as the very notion of being a physician involves helping people who are in need of aid. Of course, there are different degrees to which doctors can be seen to be helping others. Many would say, for example, that a neurosurgeon is more dedicated to helping others than a plastic surgeon. Emergency medicine jobs are some of the most demanding and rewarding fields of medicine. Thanks to the rise of locum tenens companies, doctors can experience these types of jobs first hand.

Emergency medicine jobs mainly involve resuscitating and stabilizing patients who arrive with severe medical problems. They determine whether or not those problems are life-threatening and if so, how best they should be treated. After diagnosis, doctors will send patients to the most appropriate medical service where their specific medical issues can be handled by specialists in that area.

Of course, emergency medicine jobs are no walk in the park, and they are very demanding on both a physician’s physical and mental capacities. Continually having to deal with patients who are balanced on the edge between life and death, and having to make split-second decisions that could save a patient’s life or speed up their demise certainly takes its toll on doctors in emergency medicine jobs. The reward for all of these trials and tribulations, however, lies in the knowledge that as an emergency medicine specialist, most of the patients that pass through your care will go back to their homes alive and well thanks to your efforts.

Working in such a stressful and pressured environment is most certainly not for everyone and it is a relatively rare doctor who is able to make one of the emergency medicine jobs a career choice. For those doctors contemplating this difficult but rewarding field of medicine, there is no need to jump into a big life-altering decision straight away. Instead, by applying for a locum tenens position in a hospital’s emergency medicine department, you can experience firsthand the demands that such a career places upon a physician. In addition, working locum tenens will also grant you the opportunity to meet those doctors who have chosen emergency medicine as their career, thus helping you better understand what drives a doctor to become a specialist in emergency medicine.

Due to the growing popularity of locum tenens companies, more and more staffing organizations are appearing on the internet. A quick internet search will return a large number of results, all purporting to offer top-rate support and aid for doctors looking for locum tenens employment. When choosing a locum tenens company to sign up with, you must be very careful that you choose a reputable company, because this will also affect the quality of the partner practices in which you will be placed.

Article Courtesy of Acme Articles

If you are not email marketing then you should be. Email marketing is a powerful tool that a lot of healthcare staffing agencies are not utilizing. Why is it so powerful? Because just about everyone gets email and with using an email marketing company to send your emails then results of an email can be measured.

BlueSky offers two types of Mass Email engines to our Community. We have our Plain Jane version with no tracking and then we also offer an integration with MailChimp.com. What makes MailChimp so great is that for most small businesses it is free to use and you can directly track your results including who opened your email and who clicked on it. Tracking is so important to recruiters who want to stay on top of their game. Here is why:

Example:
Sam, the old school recruiter, gets a request about a travel position in Florida for the winter. He puts together a list and emails people from Outlook letting them know about this fantastic opportunity. He sits by the phone waiting for some calls from interested candidates. He finally gets a call, a day later, from the perfect candidate. He submits their profile and lets the hospital know about his perfect candidate. Quickly after the hospital informs him the position has already been filled. Sam didn’t fill the job.

Liz, the New Media Rockstar, recruiter gets the same request about a travel position in Florida for the winter. She sends out a targeted designer email with a giant sun on it to all of her candidates who live in cold weather locations and this email is also posted to her Facebook and Twitter pages. Liz then sits by her computer and watches instantly who opened her email and who also clicked on the links. About 20 minutes later she calls all of the candidates who clicked through the email and within an hour has four candidates to be submitted to the hospital for the job. The Hospital calls her back letting her know that her candidate has been the selected for the position. Liz filled the job.

As you can see, email marketing can be very powerful because you see who opened your email, when they opened it and how many times. Do you think this type of information would be helpful to your business?

BlueSky has been built on a foundation of community and we love our community so much that we spend every Thursday afternoon with them! So, when we were looking for a way to improve our support we found Get Satisfaction.

Get Satisfaction is a online community that fosters great conversations as well as answers all your burning BlueSky questions. Some of the best ideas to improve BlueSky have come out of Community Training. And since we love working with our Community so much we really wanted to be make Community training last 24/7.

Ask a Question – Want a quick answer? The BlueSky Get Satisfaction Site is a knowledgebase of your most frequently asked questions. Including Step by Step instructions from the BlueSky Support Team as well as tips and tricks from other BlueSky Users.

Share an Idea – Continue the great ideas that come out of Community Training all week long. This is more than a simple suggestion box or voting app this encourages conversations and helps us plan upgrades based on your feedback.

Give Praise – Love something that BlueSky has done for you? Share the love and show the people behind the scenes how much you love BlueSky.

Report a Problem – Something isn’t working properly? This topic type allows you to quickly search the community for solutions, and also gives our development team real-time insight into potential product issues and defects.

So, share your ideas, post questions, show praise and report problems all at our Get Satisfaction Community. The best part is you get to hang out with the BlueSky Community without even leaving your desk!

Check it out now at http://getsatisfaction.com/blueskymss

Some of you know, we have what we call the “BlueSky Wishlist” and it is a running list of every idea our team and our clients would like to see implemented.  When an idea is presented much of time time you will hear us say, “We added that to the list.”  This mystic list becomes the starting point for each new version and ensures that each upgrade is based on our clients wants and needs.

During planning BlueSky 3.0 we went through the Wishlist and ranked everything based on priority.  Re-vamping the online application was something we have wanted to do for a long time, but when could we do it? and how much time would it take? It was such a huge undertaking we questioned if could we include other features in the next upgrade or would we just do the application.

One afternoon, after getting feedback from our fantastic development team, we knew we could fit in a lot of great upgrades in the next version.  (Our development team continues to blow my mind every upgrade!)  New and Improved Online Application, Outlook Integration, Re-Vamping Website Integration are all items the development team approved and that is when the idea for BlueSky 3.0 was born.

Did you give us your ideas for this upgrade?  Did you hear us say, “We added it to the list”? What do you think of BlueSky 3.0?  Our team truly hopes we made your life better today with the launch of BlueSky 3.0!

The Holiday Train Display, a 65-year annual tradition, runs from Black Friday until New Years Eve.  I have not gone since I was a kid, but I remember it like it was yesterday.

Every year the display has a quirky holiday theme, but one thing remains constant – trains.  Miles and miles of trains for kids (and adults) to play with.  You could watch them, ride them, build them, and of course eat them.   I could try and explain to you how awesome the Duke Holiday Trains are, but it wouldn’t do it any justice.  See for yourself. Of course, it wouldn’t be a Holiday Display without sitting on Santa’s lap.

After 3 hours of holiday fun with trains and Santa, it was, like with all Cincinnati traditions, Skyline Time!!!

What are some of the traditions that you look forward to in your city each year?

Have A Happy Holiday Season !!!