Nurses Get Prizes, Perks and Bonuses to Take Jobs : Competition: Hospitals and health-care agencies are resorting to a variety of recruiting gimmicks because of a national nursing shortage.
Sometime this fall, a chauffeured limousine will pull up to South Coast Plaza in Costa Mesa and out will step a grand-prize winner with $5,000 to start a four-hour shopping spree.
No, the lucky shopper won’t be a radio show contestant or a participant from a revival of the “Queen for a Day” television show. It will be a nurse from FHP Inc., a health maintenance organization in Fountain Valley that is rewarding nurses who recruit others for the company. The winner will be drawn in September from the names of FHP nurses who bring in new hires.
Since FHP began a new recruitment award program in March, nurses who recruit their peers have also been eligible for drawings for a camera, a portable compact-disc player and a VCR. And the company is giving away $500 for every full-time registered or licensed vocational nurse and $250 for every part-time nurse.
A severe nationwide nursing shortage is prompting FHP and other health-care companies and hospitals to pull out the stops. They are offering bonuses of up to $4,000 for nursing recruits and other bonuses for staff nurses who bring in new recruits.
The stakes are high. The number of hospital nursing vacancies statewide has more than doubled from 2,757 in 1983 to 6,770 currently. In Southern California, 11.5% of full-time positions for registered nurses were vacant in 1988, according to the latest available data from the California Assn. of Hospital and Health Systems.
The problem has been exacerbated by a four-year decline in nationwide nursing school enrollments, according to the California Nurses Assn.
As career options for women have expanded, fewer have embraced nursing. At the same time, demand for registered nurses has grown with the proliferation of home health-care services and the changing role of hospitals, which are treating patients who are more acutely ill.
So hospitals are flexing their recruiting muscles, and none more than White Memorial Medical Center, a 377-bed nonprofit hospital in Los Angeles. In addition to a $2,000 sign-up bonus, White Memorial offers nursing recruits free maid service at their homes for a year.
Such marketing gimmicks have drawn mixed response. Critics say they blemish the professional image of nursing and distract from efforts to increase nurses’ wages and improve their working conditions.
“Gimmicks are not going to solve the nursing shortage. Nurses need more say and more pay rather than a VCR,” said Maureen Anderson, spokeswoman for the California Nurses Assn., a nurses’ union.
The union is pushing for higher salaries for senior nurses, a stronger voice in hospital policy and the hiring of non-medical staff to perform everyday tasks that don’t require trained nurses, such as transporting patients in wheelchairs and distributing meals.
St. Joseph Hospital in Orange scoffs at recruitment incentives as mere gimmickry. “They are all substitutes for salary and have the potential of preventing salary raises,” said Judy Burton, the hospital’s vice president of nursing.
Nonetheless, many hospital recruiters argue that bonuses are effective recruitment tools.
They say that referral bonuses are a less-expensive way to recruit nurses than advertising in newspapers or hiring nurses by the hour from private nurse registries, which supply them for a fee. Registries tend to charge 40% more than staff nurses at hospitals receive.
Kathy Kelley, manager of professional staffing at FHP, said the $5,000 shopping spree contest helped make employees aware of the hospital’s referral bonuses. She said 10 nurses have been hired as a result of the promotion.
“In any marketing campaign, you have to have a calling card to draw them in,” said Beverly Morris, a nurse recruiter at White Memorial in Los Angeles. The hospital has signed on 35 new nurses since it began offering free maid service to recruits last October. It has also received numerous inquiries from other Southern California hospitals that are considering instituting a similar program.
Morris said the hospital also offers a $2,000 sign-up bonus and $750 to staff nurses who direct bilingual registered nurses to the hospital, which is located in predominantly Latino East Los Angeles.
Morris said job applicants are aware of the perks and not shy to ask about them. “One of the first things they ask is: ‘Do you have sign-up bonuses?’ ” she said.
“It’s not unusual for young nurses today to just move around and get what they can,” agreed Phyllis Fliegel, a nurse recruiter for Kaiser Permanente, Southern California’s largest health maintenance organization.
Kaiser offers $1,000 “finder’s fees” to any of its employees who help Kaiser recruit for hard-to-fill positions such as nurse managers and certified nurse anesthesiologists. “It works fantastically well,” Fliegel said.
Laura Kato, a recruiter at Martin Luther Hospital in Anaheim and La Palma Intercommunity Hospital in La Palma, said she relies heavily on employee referals. As an incentive, she said, the hospitals pay $1,000 to both a new recruit and the nurse who made the referral.
Chapman General Hospital in Orange has hired five or six nurses since it began offering a $2,500 referral bonus 18 months ago. “In a small facility, that really helps,” hospital administrator John Kramer said.
Hoag Hospital in Newport Beach also uses perks to attract nurses. This month, the hospital doubled its finder’s fee from $250 to $500. It also recruits nurses on a temporary basis from other parts of the country, paying their transportation and living expenses.
Health-care officials say that wooing nurses is just part of their task. Equally important, they say, is persuading them not to stray to another employer who may offer attractive incentives.
During the past couple of years, White Memorial has boosted its educational benefits for nurses, given them more decision-making power and increased wages, Morris said. As a result, the hospital’s nurse vacancy rate has fallen from between 17% and 21% to between 10% and 12%.
“The bottom line is retention. Otherwise you will have a revolving door, no matter what you offer,” said David Langness, vice president of communications for the Hospital Council of Southern California.
Langness said the council advises hospitals that they could save millions of dollars spent on recruitment ads and marketing ploys if they instead took steps to increase the number of people entering the nursing profession.
The council has organized a health career information center that, among other things, points out to job seekers that salaries for Southern California nurses rose 17% in the last two years. The average annual pay for a staff nurse in the region now is $35,214, according to the most recent council survey, while a few nurses with special training and experience make more than $100,000.
Despite a slight increase in nursing school enrollments last fall, many professional recruiters expect the shortage to worsen as hospitals continue to compete for nursing talent with other health-care providers.
“I think it will get worse before it gets better,” said Ruth Spears, employment manager at St. Joseph Hospital.
GROWING NURSE SHORTAGE
The number of openings for registered nurses in California hospitals steadily increased from 1983 to 1988. Figures for 1989 are not available, though most experts say the shortage continues to be acute. The shortage in Southern California is estimated to be nearly three percentage points higher than in the rest of the state.
Percentage of Positions Number Vacant of Year Statewide Openings 1983 3.1 2,757 1984 3.9 3,517 1985 6.4 3,374 1986 8.9 5,340 1987 9.7 6,238 1988 8.7 6,770
Source: California Assn. of Hospitals and Health Systems.
