HAP Report: Resources for a Resilient Workforce

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The onset of the coronavirus pandemic has made the need to address health care worker wellness even more relevant as many health care workers are on the front lines of managing the outbreak.

To support Pennsylvania’s health care workforce, HAP has developed a resiliency resource tool that provides an overview of the issue, guidance on building resiliency, and a compendium of resources and strategies to implement resiliency initiatives. Best practices from Pennsylvania hospitals have also been included.

Questions regarding HAP’s resiliency resource tool may be addressed to Beth Murray, HAP’s readmissions project manager, and Mary Marshall, HAP’s senior director of workforce & professional development.

HAP advocates for policies that support:

• Flexibility to respond to changing health care demands
• Sufficient education programs for physicians, nurses, and health care professionals
• Adequate residency slots for physicians
• Safe workplaces
• Team-based models of care
• Limited administrative burdens

HAP’s Health Care Talent Task Force is guiding the development of strategies that will help attract and retain the health care talent pool. This work is informed by the Joint State Government Commission Workforce Report that was issued in April 2019 as a result of HAP’s advocacy for state policymakers to place a priority on identifying challenges and opportunities to promote Pennsylvania’s health care workforce.

State Advocacy

Workplace Safety

HAP supports legislation that helps to ensure the safety of health care and hospital workers, including past legislation to remove the last name from ID badges, and increase the penalties of on-duty assaults.

Advanced Practice Professionals

HAP supports legislation to allow advanced practice nurses to practice to the full extent of their education and training in all health care facility settings, and to modernize the process to allow physician assistants to begin work immediately.

Nurse Staffing Requirements

Patient volume, acuity, and staff availability influence nurse staffing levels. Every day, hospitals review these and other factors to develop staffing plans. HAP advocates to give hospitals complete flexibility to establish safe, effective, and collaborative staffing practices. HAP opposes mandates that establish rigid nurse-patient ratios.

Federal Advocacy

To grow the health care workforce, at the federal level, HAP advocates for sustained investments in training for doctors and nurses by: 

• Maintaining Medicare graduate medical education payments that support the training of resident physicians 
• Increasing the number of federally funded residency positions through federal legislation
• Strengthening the health care workforce’s ability to respond to the opioid crisis through federal legislation
• Supporting waiving the requirement to return home for a period of time if physicians holding J-1 visas agree to stay in the United States to practice in a federally designated underserved area for three years 
• Funding Federal Title VII and VIII health professions and nursing education programs 
• Supporting nurse workforce training, including hospital-based nurse education and the innovative Graduate Nurse Education demonstration project, which was enormously successful in the Philadelphia region, to increase the supply of advanced practice nurses
  
  

HAP Contacts

For more information, contact Jeffrey Bechtel, senior vice president, health economics and policy; Heather Tyler, vice president, state legislative advocacy; Laura Stevens Kent, senior vice president of advocacy and external affairs; or Mary Marshall, senior director of workforce & professional development. Media inquiries should be directed to Liam Migdail, director, media relations.