Health care employers need to collect facility specific workforce data to support strategic planning. Hospital leadership should be as devoted to collection and analysis of personnel data as it is to collection and analysis of financial data. Health care personnel are the most critical strategic asset of the organization and should be treated as such. The data collection should focus on:

Employee Profile – This is basic demographic information about who makes up the hospital workforce. The diversity of the workforce, sources from which workers came, and educational preparation of the workers should be included.

Employee Satisfaction – This is a measure of satisfaction with the work environment and compensation. It gauges worker loyalty. Questions to ask include, “Why are workers staying, and why would they leave?” This data may be critical to a successful work redesign effort (see below for a discussion of work
redesign).

Analytical Questions — Bond rating agencies use health personnel as one criteria for assessing the creditworthiness of a hospital. A health personnel shortage can negatively impact a hospital’s credit rating.

Recognizing the critical strategic importance of health personnel, Fitch Ratings uses the following analytical questions “to ascertain the impact of the shortage and what strategies management and governance are using to address the problem.” Hospitals should ask these questions to assess their creditworthiness:

• Does the hospital have a workforce shortage?
• What is the average age of hospital workers?
• What is the vacancy rate for each type of worker?
• What is the turnover rate of workers?
• For each type of worker, ask what has been the three-year trend for average age, vacancy rate, and the turnover rate?
• Is the hospital currently using temporary staff?
• Has there been a change in the staffing mix of particular worker types?
• What has been the cost-to-date of using temporary staff and the personnel shortage in general?
• What are the hospital’s short-term solutions?
• What are the hospital’s long-term solutions?

Monitoring and understanding these critical areas will help hospital leadership prepare for the action required to address the health care personnel shortage. They also offer hospital leaders a way to assess whether progress has been made in attaining goals set out in the hospital’s strategic plan.