Start Preparing for the Hospital Leadership Shortage
By Cristina Hession, Associate Product Manager, HealthStream
The Impending Hospital Leadership Gap -- Harvard Business Publishing and HealthStream Can Help
By 2050, the number of United States citizens 65 years and older is expected to increase 138% over what it was in 2000. As the U.S. population ages and the labor force shrinks, labor shortages and leadership gaps are expected in many industries. The healthcare industry is no exception, even as the number of elderly persons requiring care increases and the number of available caregivers per patient drops dramatically. According to the Center for Workforce Studies of the Association of American Medical Colleges, roughly 40% of doctors are 55 and older, and approximately 33% of nurses are 50 and older. A Nursing Management Aging Workforce Survey conducted by the Bernard Hodes Group found that about 55% of nurses expressed an intention to retire within the next decade. While doctors and nurses continue to enter healthcare professions from medical and nursing schools, the current flow of new professionals will not be enough to replace those on the eve of retirement.
Growing Chronic Illness Needs Require Advanced Skills, More Caregivers, and More Leaders
To compound this challenging situation, individual illnesses are becoming progressively more complex and requiring more care. Chronic diseases such as obesity, cancer, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease are currently on the rise, requiring those suffering from such illnesses to receive care from numerous providers in multiple settings. While the U.S. healthcare system was primarily built to treat injuries and acute care illnesses, the rise in chronic illnesses requires providers to develop new competencies in order to continue delivering high quality care. These increased cases of chronic illness combined with new technology, new regulations, information management systems, and care outside of the hospital require healthcare providers to develop important non-clinical competencies such as leadership, teamwork, and collaboration. They will also need to establish processes for successful patient hand-offs from one clinician to the next. Now more than ever, nurses and doctors must work together to coordinate care across teams of professionals, using a broader portfolio of soft skills- including negotiation, strategy, and decision-making to achieve positive patient outcomes.
HealthStream People Development and Training Solutions Help Hospitals Succeed
HealthStream is already partnering with over 50% of the nation’s hospitals to help forge the path forward into a new age of patient care. The HealthStream Performance and Competency Centers are paving the way for healthcare providers to adopt an expanding set of competency and performance standards in a variety of settings. The HealthStream Learning Center, with a content library of over 6,000 courses, enables tailored skills development and remediation based on the outcomes of performance reviews and competency assessments. With transitions of care figuring prominently in today’s healthcare arena and an impending leadership shortage in the coming years, the development of leadership competencies is now more important than ever.
Develop Healthcare Leaders and Managers with Harvard ManageMentor Training
Partnering with Harvard Business Publishing, HealthStream is now offering Harvard ManageMentor, a collection of 44 action-oriented management essentials developed under the guidance of global experts and leaders, as well as Stepping Up To Management, a program designed to help newly-promoted managers realize immediate success in their new role. With individual course topics ranging from Decision Making to Process Improvement, to course bundles on Communication, Conflict Management, and Performance Management, Harvard Business Publishing provides a very timely skills development opportunity for the situation now faced by our providers. In moving toward a measurement and education system that reflects the dynamic healthcare landscape, HealthStream enables its network of facilities and providers to keep pace with rapidly changing concepts of quality care.
Learn More about Stepping Up to Management and ManageMentor from Harvard Business Publishing.