Healthcare organizations around the nation are scrambling to stay on top of the COVID-19 pandemic. Many facilities are finding that adequate staffing — a hurdle in the best of times — has become a monumental challenge.
During a virtual panel discussion hosted by the Alliance for Health Policy last week, experts discussed several strategies for increasing healthcare worker capacity.
Expanding nurses’ scope of practice and allowing for expedited licensing are two options that could help increase capacity at healthcare systems — including skilled nursing facilities and assisted living communities, they noted.
For example, an “army” of nursing students is set to graduate this year, said panelist Polly Pittman, professor of health policy and management and director at the George Washington University Milken Institute School of Public Health.
“There are all kinds of opportunities to mobilize that workforce with temporary licenses,” she said. “You could have nursing students who haven’t graduated operating as LPNs, and LPNs who haven’t graduated could operate as CNAs. There’s a lot of room for creativity there and it involves leadership on the part of the licensure bodies, in coordination in response to the needs healthcare organizations have.”
This and other worker expansion strategies are not just hospital-centric, noted panelist Stephen Parodi, M.D., executive vice president of external affairs, communications and brand for the Permanente Federation and associate executive director of the Permanente Medical Group.
“We’ve got to be thinking about skilled nursing facilities, and what immediately comes to mind is the initial experience in Kings County up in Washington state, where a lot of the morbidity and mortality was centered around a particular skilled nursing facility,” Parodi said. “So repurposing either the skilled nursing facilities so we can provide the care there with the appropriate [personal protective equipment] and training or actually using alternative sites like hotels to provide skilled care there, or post-discharge care out of a hospital, is going to be critically important.”
