Hospices need to do a better job of getting the word out about the job opportunities that exist for clinicians in the field, and how they differ from working in other health care settings.

Worsening workforce shortages have been keeping hospice leaders awake at night for several years running. The COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated the crisis, leading some hospice providers to shut down their programs or sell off their businesses because they could not recruit or retain a sufficient number of employees. Now, a few years out from the pandemic, these issues persist.

“We really have had a flat line in on-boards to the industry. We saw rapid growth in new health care professionals joining the industry from the late 2000s to 2020, and then you can see a real flat line,” David Jackson, CEO of Choice Health at Home, told Hospice News. “So getting new people in the industry is really important.”

Factors like compensation, benefits and work schedules are crucial to recruitment, but providers can also leverage their story to show candidates that hospice care is the “coolest job” in health care, according to Jackson. This means leveraging their mission, their patients’ experiences and the relative autonomy of providing care in the home, he said.

“We have the coolest job. You want to treat your patients one-on-one? Come work here. Nowhere else can you get that,” Jackson said. “You want to go drop your kids off at three o’clock and then come back and see your last patient? Can’t do that at the hospital, right? You can do it here. We have the flexibility of scheduling.”

Providers can apply some of the same strategies in workforce building that they use to market to patients and referral partners. For example, positive stories about how families have benefited from hospice care.

This can include well-known examples such as the experience of the family of former President Carter who died in hospice care late last year.

Hospices can also trumpet the unique nature of their work, including the ability to really spend time with patients delivering goal-concordant care and the chance to build longitudinal relationships with families if the patient comes on service early enough.

Sharing the story of hospice care, both for patients and for workers in the field, is essential to recruitment and retention in the long run, according to Nick Westfall, CEO and chairman of VITAS Healthcare, a subsidiary of Chemed Corp. (NYSE: CHE).

“We can expand awareness around hospice and palliative care as a high-quality career path for clinicians. We haven’t done as good of a job as we should have as an industry to tell our story and attract people to us,” Westfall told Hospice News. “We’ve never had an issue with recruiting, but we can do a much better job of proactively telling our story and having testimonials. Industries such as hospice really have to find ways to differentiate themselves and overtly and clearly talk about the value proposition, to try to attract those people that have desires and behavioral characteristics that align with that, to consider us earlier in their career.”