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A Stronger Workforce: Strategies from the 2025 AHA Health Care Workforce Scan
The American Hospital Association’s 2025 Health Care Workforce Scan offers important insights into the current state of the health care workforce and outlines potential approaches to address both present and future staffing challenges. In this conversation, Claire Zangerle, DNP, R.N., chief executive officer of the American Organization for Nursing Leadership (AONL), and senior vice president and chief nurse executive of the American Hospital Association, and Joel Moore, DNP, R.N., chief nursing officer of MercyOne Genesis, and chair of the AONL Workforce Committee, discuss the strategies the Workforce Scan has identified, including how organizations can rethink culture, improve workforce pipelines, and leverage partnerships to rebuild a stronger health care workforce.
To learn more about The American Hospital Association’s 2025 Health Care Workforce Scan, please visit www.aha.org/aha-workforce-scan
Transcript
Tom Haederle
erican Hospital Association's: ::Elisa Arespacochaga
Hello, I'm Elisa Arespacochaga, vice president for clinical affairs and workforce with the American Hospital Association. Joining me today are Joel Moore, chief nursing officer with MercyOne Genesis and chair of the AONL Workforce Committee, and Claire Zangerle, chief executive officer of AONL, the American Organization for Nursing Leadership and senior vice president and chief nursing officer with the American Hospital Association.
::Elisa Arespacochaga
we're here to talk about the: ::Elisa Arespacochaga
We've got to keep the ones we have, and we really have to do more to encourage them to want to be in health care because there is probably a reason they started in health care. They were called to be there. Those four areas are embracing technologically integrated care models and innovation. Let's use technology as best we can.
::Elisa Arespacochaga
The second is engaging the clinical teams in the design of those innovations. We've got to get them involved in all of those details. Third, boosting access by increasing that workforce through some innovative partnerships, encouraging more people to come into health care, who might not have thought of health care as a career and rethinking how we can engage with our workforce.
::Elisa Arespacochaga
And I know most of the world is rethinking how they engage with their workforce in a more remote era. But we're going to talk a lot about how do we work on all four of those at the same time, while continuing to take care of the patients that come to our doors every day. Joel and Claire and I'll ask Joel - for you to start.
::Elisa Arespacochaga
How are you seeing in your roles the field really connect these ideas together - from everything from how do we use technology? How do we bring the clinicians in to encourage more people to join health care and also really engage those we have? How do you see those threading together as you're trying to address workforce challenges?
::Joel Moore
Yeah, it's a great question. I really appreciate what you said at the beginning about us being called into nursing. And I think that starts with the person at the bedside. And so as I've seen models of care and workforce wrap around and through these four top-of-mind ideas from the Workforce Scan, we have to really focus on the person providing care and engage them at every level of the work.
::Joel Moore
I think some of the work from our history and from our past, how things unfolded, it was very much top down. At this era we need bedside nurses to be a part of technology innovation, redesigning the model of care, helping us establish what a healthy work environment is about. So I think we can tackle all four of these, but I think we have to have it driven by the nurse at the bedside, or from those frontline staff who are providing direct care to our communities.
::Elisa Arespacochaga
Claire, from your perspective at AONL, how do you see this?
::Claire Zangerle, DNP, R.N.
I think all four of these tenants for the Workforce Scan fit together very well to make a bigger picture of what needs to happen with the workforce. Embracing technology is so important because that in and of itself reduces the workload of those who are delivering care, whether they're in acute care setting, an outpatient setting, an ambulatory surgery center, post-acute care - wherever they are. Bringing those clinicians in to help make the decisions around the solution is essential to success.
::Claire Zangerle, DNP, R.N.
There's really no way that anything technologically around the workforce can be successful without that clinician voice. Making sure that we take down some of those barriers that many are seeing as access to getting into health care so that they can become part of the health care ecosystem, I think is important, too, and it's really incumbent upon us as leaders in health care to take those barriers down.
::Claire Zangerle, DNP, R.N.
And again, let's not forget about the people who are already here, who are already doing the hard work so that we can reengage them so that we can, you know, court them again, have them fall back in love with their jobs because we're losing them. And that's the hard part, is all of that knowledge capital and that dedication is leaving.
::Claire Zangerle, DNP, R.N.
And those are let's solve the problems that we can solve because there's a lot of problems we can't. And that's a problem we can solve.
::Elisa Arespacochaga
I completely agree with that. Joel, from your perspective, I know we've gotten to work together on the AHA and AONL care model learning community. What are you seeing organizations embrace in that technology space into their care models? And what do you think is really had the most impact?
::Joel Moore
I am going to be cautious to say what's had the most impact, because I think we're still in development. We're still in the middle of the PDSA cycle. One of the first things that we stood up as a nursing profession in the pandemic and post pandemic was virtual nursing. And that's a model that does work for some. But I am unsure about the sustainability and if it really is having impact on patient outcomes.
::Joel Moore
I think this is our era of really thinking outside the box. I'm getting goosebumps thinking about ambient listening and the forward thinking that's being done with that. Some people are labeling it AI and how that supports the lift of the workforce load. But, you know, I think about the little devices that we have in our homes and that we've had for years that we're bossing around. What can we do to develop technology with these really brilliant people that are at the bedside now to help support and engage and attract future workforce clinicians that won't ever even touch a keyboard?
::Joel Moore
So, you know, there's so much technology - from help that's moving pharmaceuticals from, you know, one level to another in the hospital to ambient listening to virtual nursing. There's just a long stream of technology that's helping us at this point.
::Elisa Arespacochaga
Absolutely. And I think you are, you hit it on the head. We are very much in a phase of trying all of these different technologies to see which really, truly hit value for our organizations. And, you know, really help at the end of the day, that bedside nurse, that bedside clinician provide the best possible care for their patient.
::Joel Moore
What's driving the outcomes? I don't think we have enough to say what has been the most successful to help drive outcomes, which is what we need to be looking at.
::Claire Zangerle, DNP, R.N.
I think we also have to recognize the maturity of organizations around adopting technology. All organizations are on a different maturity model. Some are just thinking about it and what does it look like? And they're very scared of it. And I get that. And they're also asking themselves, do I have the money to invest in this? Because what if it doesn't work?
::Claire Zangerle, DNP, R.N.
I'm taking a big chance. We're seeing a lot of people do pilots, and this is okay to do a pilot, to say, does this work for me and if not, I'm going to either scale fast or fail fast. And I think it's important that people realize that when they think about technology. But there's also a human side to this technology that's being adopted and that I think will come out loud and clear in the Workforce Scan.
::Claire Zangerle, DNP, R.N.
Because just because you put technology in does not mean that you eliminate the human touch and the human aspect of caregiving. There's a lot of ways to do new models of care, including that human touch. Maybe you're using new disciplines to deliver that care, and they're infusing new technologies into using those new disciplines. We're inviting LPNs back into the acute care space when before we had somewhat dismissed LPNs to other care sites because we didn't have a place for them in acute care. Now we're rethinking that,
::Claire Zangerle, DNP, R.N.
and that's the beauty of our being nimble in health care is to be able to rethink and reapproach for what works today and what is going to work for the future.
::Joel Moore
Claire, I love that. I love that part too, perhaps even the people part of nursing. Perhaps we need to challenge, you know, what's our scope? We haven't revisited that for a while. You know, the scope of the RN, the scope of the LPN. It's, you know, it could be something. I've seen studies over in Europe, and we have opportunity to think about people.
::Joel Moore
And I love the thread of people that is woven through the four core challenges brought forward in the Workforce Scan.
::Elisa Arespacochaga
Joel, let me pick up on that. We all know that, you know, to some extent, the math doesn't work. With the retirement and aging of the baby boomers, the next generation, the staffing shortages, all of those things, they're just not going to go away. What are some of the pathways and partnerships you're seeing locally to really encourage people to not only get into health care, but now get into this, this new version of health care, this one that has the technology that is connecting to its frontline teams.
::Joel Moore
Yeah, it's taking the message out early. You know, we have to engage what we've done here is engage in our community, even at the elementary school age level and talked about the brand image or what is a nurse now? What does that look like? We're still pretty close to the pandemic. So there's this frightening view of what it may appear to be if you were to practice nursing.
::Joel Moore
And so taking the image of nursing and talking about the flexibility and engagement in the community that you can develop when you go into a profession like nursing, or many other professions at the bedside. So it's cultivating relationships early. I have a lot of energy focused on my partnerships with my colleges and universities that are within a 60 mile radius of the buildings. The colleges and universities know
::Joel Moore
I'm going to say yes to every nursing student, once they get into studies to come and do their clinicals in my building. Because that's the future workforce. And there isn't enough of them. So engaging with our colleges and universities and taking the message out in places where we hadn't been before, I think there's still opportunity to perhaps persuade some people in other vocations.
::Joel Moore
I'm a second vocation nurse, so I think we could persuade others to join the health care work environment if they really knew what fulfillment they would get practicing.
::Elisa Arespacochaga
I always say that there are a lot of places I could earn a living with my MBA, but health care is the only place that feeds my soul. Claire, from a national perspective, we know health care works workers are...they're tired. Health care is hard. It's never not been hard. But we've been able to continue to attract a great, amazing group of people to work in health care and be connected to health care.
::Elisa Arespacochaga
What are some of the strategies to now, given the challenges we're seeing, to keep them in health care?
::Claire Zangerle, DNP, R.N.
The first thing we need to recognize is that the workforce is evolving. We have new generations of workers that are here in our midst, and we have to recognize that. We have to recognize the opportunity to embrace those ways of thinking. Back in the day, you would work 24/7 and not think anything about it. That's not healthy.
::Claire Zangerle, DNP, R.N.
We have to recognize that people want to have harmony. They want to have a little bit of balance in their life. And health care is open 24/7, so we have to recognize that. And make sure that we're meeting the needs of a workforce that is before us. If we don't do that, we're not doing ourselves any favors. We're not going to grow our workforce.
::Claire Zangerle, DNP, R.N.
We're not going to retain the people that want to work in this profession. You hear all the time, I love what I do, but I can't maintain the pace. And I think we will attract more people if we become more realistic about what people want in their work life.
::Elisa Arespacochaga
Joel, on the ground at your organization, what some of the ways that you are really building that engagement and connection to your frontline teams?
::Joel Moore
One of the ways is that we are building a culture of trust. You know, my visibility as CNO is really important. So our leaders are with our frontline, our executive level leaders are rounding, being with the frontline as much. So building that culture of trust, picking up on one thing that Claire had said, you know, at my organization, we are really trying to cultivate our workforce to look like our community.
::Joel Moore
So we have a variety of cultures within our community. So we are recruiting from different neighborhoods that we hadn't recruited before. Which, you know, engages us in new ways as we're learning more about the people who may not be exactly like us.
::Elisa Arespacochaga
That's awesome.
::Elisa Arespacochaga
ries that are included in the: ::Elisa Arespacochaga
staff. So thank you both for joining me.
::Tom Haederle
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