Fierce competition for clinical resources amid widespread workforce shortages has hospices taking nimble approaches to their recruitment strategies, including pivoting financial investments and building stronger educational partnerships.

Competition in the health care market has been driving up salaries, particularly among nurses, according to Jennifer Lemere, vice president of clinical operations at St. Croix Hospice, a portfolio company of the private equity firm H.I.G. Capital. But rising compensation trends are also occurring across the interdisciplinary spectrum, Lemere added.

The climbing labor costs are outpacing annual hospice reimbursement increases, challenging many providers to pay close attention to how they spend their recruitment and retention dollars, she said during the Hospice News Staffing Summit. Having a system of financial checks and balances is crucial to evaluating the effectiveness of hiring strategies, Lemere stated.

“Whatever you’re investing in, have a system in place to monitor and make sure the return on investment is there [and] you don’t just throw money at it,” she told Hospice News during the virtual summit.

Competitive compensation rates have complicated hospices’ ability to cultivate and maintain a collaborative and a supportive organizational culture – a large sticking point to retention, according to SilverStone Health CEO Alfonso Montiel. Hospices risk losing clinicians seeking higher compensation to competitors with greater financial resources, incurring turnover that impedes the ability for staff to fully acclimate to an organization’s culture, Montiel stated.

Combatting the competition issues includes careful examination of where a hospice is putting their financial resources in terms of not only recruitment, but also retention of current staff, he added. More hospices have been focusing on ways to communicate the value of their work and how their services impact people across the care continuum, not just at the end of life, Montiel said.

“It’s hard to build community and hard to maintain a culture if our clinical resources are moving from company to company just to get a small salary increase and then leave,” Montiel told Hospice News during the summit. “You don’t get the time to assimilate to a culture, and you don’t get time for consistency. We’re spending more resources and funds creating marketing materials that speak to our own team. At SilverStone we often say that every life is like a plane that we’re all going to land, and what we can do with hospice and palliative care is, instead of crashing, we help it glide. We’re trying to lift and capture the stories that allow team members to understand how ours can be the most fulfilling career path that they could have ever chosen.”

Hospices balance several competing financial priorities when it comes to their recruitment efforts, said Rexanne Domico, president and COO of Interim HealthCare, a subsidiary of Caring Brands International. Hospices need a wide view into their overall budget to determine whether they have the potential to reallocate financial resources toward stronger recruitment efforts, according to Domico.

Hospices have increasingly seen success from shifting dollars into recruitment outreach that highlights both the nature of their services and the reasons why employees enter and stay in the field, she added. Highlighting the unique and meaningful experience of helping people at the end of their lives can speak volumes to future clinicians seeking to make a difference, Domico added.

“What’s really interesting is starting to shift some of your marketing budget to more of a recruiting-type of budget and really trying to produce things, like short videos, that help show a ‘day in the life’ [and] give people an understanding of [what] the rewarding aspects of working in hospice are,” Domico said during the webinar. “It’s the ability to be able to put some things out there that give a different idea of the value, purpose and meaning behind the work. Really driving those differentiators about the clinical experience would be incredibly important as we talk with and build out effective workforces in this area.”

Reaching medical students earlier in their educational pathways is an additionally important part of hospices’ recruitment efforts, said Lemere. Many clinicians do not receive exposure to hospice or palliative care throughout the course of their medical education, something providers are increasingly narrowing focus on changing.

Developing partnerships with local educational institutions has been a key to St. Croix Hospice’s workforce development, Lemere stated.

“We are partnering with nursing schools so that their students can have clinical experience alongside us,” she said. “We’re also getting invited into the classroom to educate about what hospice is, the benefit of hospice and the benefits of working in hospice. We’re doing this with doctors too, as we’re involved in a fellowship program and developing other programs with certain medical schools.”