Lab personnel shortage: the growing crisis

Medical Laboratory Observer, July, 1988 by Bettina G. Martin

With fewer graduates entering the clinical laboratory field and more employess leaving a serious personnel shortage has developed . Lab managers must identify and implement solutions.

Clinical laboratories are not quite ready to shanghai staff, but the national shortage of lab personnel has prompted unusual recruitment measures:

Desperate to fill a technologist-supervisor position, an upstate New York blood bank advertised a starting salary of up to $66,000 plus an apartment rentfree for one year.

A hospital offered 30 days' vacation for all new midnight-to-8 a.m. technologists. (I was told that current employees at the hospital agreed to this recruiting technique.)

In one large city, technologists have been recruited with an incentive of one year of free parking in a parking garage adjacent to the hospital.

Another hospital offered meal allowances for breakfast and lunch for a period of up to one year.

A Federal hospital offers greatly reduced costs for house or apartment rentals.

Growth in the number of classified ads in MLO for positions available reflects the increasing demand. In 1986, the magazine averaged 2.5 classified-ad pages per month. The average rose to 5.4 pages in 1987, and this year, the March, May, and June issues each carried a record 9.7 classified-ad pages. Metropolitan newspapers are experiencing similar increases in laboratory helpwanted ads.

Increasingly, hospital recruiters are renting booths at laboratory society meetings. The North California division of the American Society for Medical Technology had requests from 14 hospitals for booth space at its 1988 spring meeting.

One reason many health care segments are struggling with staff shortages is that they neglected recruitment and retention issues during the prospective payment upheaval of recent years. As hospitals concentrated on cutting costs (including Labor outlays) while increasing productivity, they began to lose personnel to more lucrative, less stressful fields. At the same time, fewer students were choosing health careers; medical technology and other educational programs shrank.

The situation in New York exemplifies the nation's overall health care personnel problem. In January, the New York State Labor-Health Industry Task Force issued a report on the shortage of health care workers. The report stated that the number of disabled and chronically ill people will continue to increase as advances in medical treatment prolong lives, AIDS admissions will "increase, the elderly population will expand, and the physic ian-to-population ratio will grow, contributing to an increased demand for health services and personnel.

On the supply side, the report noted that the number of new graduates from health occupation programs is stagnant or falling. For one thing, women now have a wider variety of career choices, and fewer are choosing health care professions. In addition, New York's under-35 population will decline 10 per cent by the year 2000. All of this is seen leading to fierce competition for young workers.

AIDS treatment alone will require 3,382 new hospital beds in New York State by 1991 and 700 more technicians and technologists, among other employees, another state health report said.

The New York task force recommended improving overall compensation and working conditions for health care occupations facing personnel shortages, fostering career mobility, making more effective use of the work force, establishing a more effective way to assess future needs of health care personnel, and encouraging new entrants to the health industry. Task force members said educational and credentialing barriers that limit access to jobs without significantly improving health care delivery should be revised to reflect the current lowsupply, high-demand situation.

Stories about the national nursing shortage-the first health care staffing crunch to emerge-serve as cautionary tales for laboratories that have begun feeling a staffing pinch. In 1987, New Jersey nurses left $12-per-hour jobs in hospitals for $20-per-hour jobs with agencies that placed them in a nursing pool. They then returned to their former positions at a much higher pay rate.

A New Jersey Hospital Association survey found that 68 hospitals spent a total of $15 million to fill nursing vacancies with temporary help during the first six months of 1987. That was up 85 per cent from the amount spent in the same period a year earlier.

Already, states have started compiling ominous statistics about the lack of laboratory personnel. Hospitals in New York State have a 5.3 per cent vacancy rate for technologists and technicians, according to the task force report. Some 200 lab workers were needed by the 146 hospitals that reported vacancies. Of these hospitals, 21 per cent cited severe recruitment problems, 14 per cent severe retention problems.

The March 1988 newsletter of the Wyoming State Society for Medical Technology said the state had more laboratory jobs available in 1987 than it could fill with graduates of its own MT programs. The newsletter also reported an increased number of medical technology job openings in the neighboring states of South Dakota, North Dakota, and Iowa; a rise to 10 to 15 per week in newspaper ads for technologists in the Omaha, Neb., area late last year; and a decline in MT program graduates in California to fewer than 200 students in 1987.