Health System Workforce
Experience Accelerator

The backbone of every healthcare organization — critical to its success in delivering high quality care to patients — is its workforce. No matter how important a proposed intervention is, it will not be successful without a workforce to guide and support it. A robust healthcare workforce that views their work as mission-critical, along with a thriving pipeline of individuals committed to improving the lives in the Carolinas, is essential.

Healthcare workforce shortages exist today nationally as well as across the Carolinas and, looking ahead, the gap between healthcare workforce supply and demand is likely to widen if current trends continue. The COVID-19 pandemic amplified the problem — nationwide, nearly one in five healthcare workers left their jobs over the course of the pandemic — and continues to cause workforce concerns, exacerbating other longstanding issues that have contributed to the shortage. One national survey found that workforce challenges were the top concern for hospital CEOs in 2022, ranking even higher than financial challenges.

Given the breadth and complexity of these challenges, workforce efforts are often grouped into a few different but interrelated domains, including (a) workforce pipeline development and recruitment that aims to attract qualified staff into vacant healthcare positions, and (b) retention efforts that focus on healthcare employee job satisfaction and wellbeing so that they stay in the field. While both the pipeline of future employees and retention of current employees are critical, CaroNova is well positioned to support health systems with retention through an Accelerator project. Accelerators are designed to be relatively fast projects that leverage our resources to quickly convene partners and catalyze adoption for lasting change.

We are currently working to accelerate health system adoption of best practices to improve healthcare worker resiliency and reduce burnout. Our goal is to retain and strengthen the current healthcare workforce in the Carolinas by equipping health systems with tools and strategies to foster resiliency among their employees. We will accomplish this by coalescing best practices into a single, easily accessible resource and creating a forum for learning among health systems in the Carolinas.

This Workforce Accelerator project focuses on healthcare workforce retention by:

• Examining the root causes and factors contributing to healthcare workforce resiliency and burnout  

• Compiling and launching an online library of existing best practices and innovative solutions that leverage insights from subject matter experts through a co-design process to improve resiliency and reduce burnout

• Developing a learning collaborative to accelerate broad adoption of identified best practices among hospitals across the Carolinas 

This Accelerator will marry the latest evidence and real-world experiences from stakeholders to facilitate health system learning and action. We will collaborate with and draw from the expertise and experiences of subject matter experts who are already diligently working to address the workforce crisis. Key stakeholders and partners with whom we will work include state and regional organizations (e.g., colleagues at NCHA and SCHA and the North Carolina Center on the Workforce for Health) as well as individual hospitals and health systems who are innovating in this space. This Accelerator aims to build upon and spread their successes and provide a platform for them to share lessons learned about what does and does not work in their communities. An evaluation plan with defined success metrics will also be developed and implemented over the course of the project to assess the impact and effectiveness of this Accelerator.

Our team is in the early stages of launching this program by assessing the extensive research and efforts that already exist in this area and ultimately compiling the most effective and promising strategies into a single repository for health systems to easily access. Activities will occur in two phases spanning 24 months.

For more information or to get involved, please connect with our team members listed above.