Hospitals Offering Incentives in Bid to Hire Skilled Nurses

Ventura County hospitals are stepping up efforts to hire highly skilled nurses, offering a variety of incentives to overcome an industrywide shortage, and promising to make nurses’ lives better.

“There’s been a nursing shortage for two years and now the hospitals are pulling out all the stops to bring them in,” said Monty Clark, a hospital industry representative in Ventura. “There’s a pattern here. And, generally, the hospitals are using as much innovation as they can afford.”

Highlighted by last winter’s flu epidemic, which left every local hospital overflowing with patients but with too few nurses, the shortage has prompted them to pay for nurses’ continuing education, and offer better pay and benefits, as well as more flexible work schedules.

The shortage exists partly because harried nurses--overworked after hospital cutbacks in the early 1990s--have retired, taken jobs with health maintenance organizations or moved into caring for patients at their homes.

At the same time, nursing schools are producing fewer highly trained graduates because managed-care cuts had made it difficult for young nurses to get jobs. And women--92% of nurses--are increasingly choosing careers with better pay.

That has left Southern California’s 58 hospitals with 833 registered nursing vacancies, according to a recent study by an industry council. And more than 500 of those are in highly specialized areas, such as critical care, labor and delivery, and surgery.

As a result, local hospitals are hustling for nurses with a fervor not seen here for a decade.

In Thousand Oaks, Los Robles Regional Medical Center is trying to fill 55 vacancies by developing its own registered nurses. It offers internships to nursing students and hires graduates right out of college--a practice previously avoided because of the cost of training them.

Los Robles nurses can also now opt for 12-hour shifts and three-day workweeks, flexibility prized by employees. Nurses’ tuition is reimbursed when they go back to college, and classes are offered at the hospital.

“We have made the nurse’s job tougher than it was 10 or 15 years ago,” said Robert Shaw, chief executive at Los Robles. “Now we’re trying to change that.”

In Ventura, Community Memorial Hospital recently formed a Nursing Council to air the concerns of nurses and is hiring a full-time nurse recruiter. It offers flexible shifts, tuition grants and nurse scholarships.

“We’re trying to develop programs to bring nurses back into the field,” said Michael Bakst, executive director at Community Memorial, which has a chronic nurse shortage.

In Oxnard and Camarillo, the two St. John’s hospitals recently increased nurse pay between 5% and 8%, and beefed up retirement plans by matching employee retirement savings dollar-for-dollar. But the two hospitals still have more than a dozen vacant positions for registered nurses and are hosting a job fair today.

“We have to create an environment where they feel valued and rewarded,” said Jim Hoss, administrator at St. John’s in Oxnard. “We just have to create satisfying nursing opportunities.”

Simi Valley Hospital also recently sponsored a job fair to lure retired or part-time nurses back into the work force.

Historically, there have been nursing shortages in California about every 10 years because of natural demographic ebbs and flows. But today’s shortage of registered nurses--especially those with special skills--results from the forces of managed-care medicine.

As HMOs have come to dominate medical care, they have cut payments to hospitals sharply. And the hospitals consequently laid off nurses.

“The hospitals created this nursing shortage and now they’re trying to figure out a way to solve it,” said Jill Furillo, spokeswoman for the California Nurses Assn.

“They cut their costs by replacing experienced nurses with unlicensed personnel only to find that didn’t work because HMO patients are so sick, they need the skill of a registered nurse.”

The remaining nurses have suffered from overload, stretched thin by cutbacks and treating sicker patients all the time.

Now many nurses who were fired and left the profession are leery to return, Furillo said.

“Some of them are so shellshocked because they had served their hospitals for so many years and were fired,” she said. “Now they’re afraid that if they go back, it will be the same thing in another year. Whatever the employer gives, they can take away.”

But administrators at Los Robles, which sponsored a workshop on the nurse shortage Tuesday, said they are looking for a permanent fix. And that can only be accomplished by making nurses’ lives better, officials said.

“We want to come up with some long-term solutions,” Shaw said. “We want to fill the pipeline with quality people.”