Q&A with Nick Morse, Interim CFO for Nadora Healthcare

Nick Morse explains how healthcare organizations can reimagine their budget when it comes to offering employees a supportive work environment while also providing patients with high-quality care.

Maintaining their workforce has been a challenge for healthcare organizations even before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Hospitals and health systems were dealing with a shortage of nurses and losing their staff to more lucrative and well-paying opportunities.

Having the responsibility of managing the finances for a large healthcare provider means having to weigh what is best for your workforce against what is best for the organization's overall financial health.

To help CFOs better understand how to balance their workforce and their bottom line, HealthLeaders connected with Nick Morse, interim CFO for Nadora Healthcare, a spine center, and pain management care provider, to hear his thoughts on the best solution to this problem.

Morse discussed the ever-evolving healthcare workforce, where hospitals and health systems should be making investments when it comes to their employees, and the best attraction and retention solutions organizations should be utilizing.

HealthLeaders: Where should hospitals and health systems make the biggest investments when it comes to their workforce?

Nick Morse: You want to keep up with inflation—I know that’s a hot topic right now, but consumer purchasing right now has to do with how much your employees can buy with what they make. If they're doing the same amount of work, but their purchasing power goes down, you’ll want to make sure to try to stay in line with that. So, the first thing I would say is just straightening out their paychecks. People love pizza parties, people love new gear, and people love pens, hats, swag, and all that stuff. But really, it comes down to this old political adage: 'people make decisions at the dinner table.' If you're going to retain good employees, you want to invest in your employees' paychecks.

The second area where hospitals and health systems should make investments in the workforce is thinking about how you right-size your staff so that your nurses, doctors, CNAs, PAs, MAs, and all the other acronyms we know aren't feeling burnt out. It is extremely important to make sure that if you know it will take three people to facilitate great patient care, you should really staff five or six. This way if Mr. or Ms. Smith needs a day off or they get sick, you aren't stressing the system or forcing other people to do more work than they can mentally and emotionally stand.

HL: How has Nadora Healthcare managed to attract and retain its own workforce through the great resignation?

Morse: Paying people well is important. Even with our starting salaries for incoming nurses, we make sure to pay competitive hospital rates even though we're an ambulatory surgery center. When it comes to attracting and retaining the workforce, attracting is almost easier I think because when someone is looking for a new job, they have already made up their mind about not working here. So, when you're recruiting new people, you're able to say, here's our compensation package, here are your hours, here's how much you make, and here's who you work with. And if they choose to come over to you, great, do the paperwork, bring them in, get them trained, and in about six to nine months, they're capable of working in all the departments at our company, and they can move forward.

Retaining the workforce is the difficult part. Any trained professional who's a clinician can jump from employer to employer so retaining the workforce is much more difficult. And like I said, it's not pizza parties, even though we have those. It is, do they like the work they do? Do they enjoy the people they work with? Are they treated well at work? So, these are professionals, you know, once they're trained, we let them do their work, and we stay out of their hair? And are they compensated correctly with where they live?

HL: Would you agree that there has been a shift in the mindset, where it used to be that employees should be grateful to have a job, but now employers are the ones who should be grateful for their workforce?

Morse: You should always be looking around the corner. These trained professionals can quit at any time and go down the street and be employed within a day. The companies that you're seeing be successful and not closed down are not having people working 80 hours a week, in a field where they should be working 40 or 50 a week, I think they've treated people right all along. That's just my opinion. I think the pandemic maybe was enlightening for employees to say, what am I doing here? Why am I wasting my time I make 50 or 60 bucks an hour, I can go make 70 bucks an hour down the street and be treated better. Sometimes it takes external influences to cause us as humans to rethink our situation. And so, for some companies, yes, they absolutely needed a culture shock.

HL: How can healthcare organizations reimagine their budget when it comes to providing employees with a supportive work environment but also providing patients with high-quality care?

Morse: Access to high-quality care is the most important thing—you can never lose sight of that. But reimagining your budget to provide employees with a supportive work environment, there are certainly things you can do. Let's just for the sake of argument, say, you don't have to worry about the paycheck problem, and all your employees are compensated well, that’s the first thing you need to cover.

But number two is benefits. We have a pretty creative benefits package here, it's not just healthcare, dental, and vision. It getting creative on paid time off, can paid time off be cashed out? That is something that I see a lot of, when you save up 80 hours of PTO you can cash it out at your hourly rate. It’s making sure you're bringing, not just in services for training at the jobs that they feel confident in what they're doing in their department, but bringing mental health resources, physical health, massage, PT, those sort of things into your facility so that people can take a break at work. Those things are really important. Making sure that the facility is safe, as simple as that sounds, make sure people feel comfortable and secure when they're at work. All those things can go into reimagining your budget.

Check out the latest episode of the HealthLeaders podcast to hear more from our conversation with Nick Morse.