With the COVID-19 pandemic and the disruptions it brought to work-life balance, Tina Piotrowski, CEO of Copper Ridge Surgery Center in Michigan, said ASCs are particularly vulnerable to loss of staff.
This is an edited excerpt. Download the full episode here.
Given this past year with the COVID-19 pandemic and so many different things happening in the healthcare space, what are your top priorities as the CEO of an ASC today?
Tina Piotrowski: One of the top priorities is maintaining a competent, well-trained workforce in a highly competitive market. Like many ASCs, we face competition for staff from hospitals who offer attractive sign-on bonuses and often much higher wages. Since the pandemic, we have definitely seen a number of our clinical staff wanting to reduce their hours due to school and child care issues related to COVID. And we are working hard to offer more flexible part-time positions, but filling in the gaps is increasingly more challenging.
We're putting an initiative together that is going to allow us to collect feedback from employees at each department as far as how to have a more flexible work-life balance, how to meet the needs of the center while also meeting personal needs.