Hospital Industry Consortium

In the case of the Metro South/West Hospital Industry Consortium, the local regional employment board joined with four hospitals in a sectoral project to address staffing shortages in the industry. The project’s goals are to:

• reduce shortages of technical and nursing personnel

• improve the earnings of housekeepers, and food and environmental services workers, through education and training

• improve access of public assistance recipients and low income residents to jobs in the health care sector.

Backed by an unusually strong coalition of hospital administrators, the partnership is dedicated to addressing the shortage of nurses, moving workers into higher paying nursing and management positions, and expanding to other hospitals in the region.

Recent comments by Sylvia Beville, Executive Director of the Metro South/West Regional Employment Board that leads the hospital consortia, reflect early lessons learned from the project:

In our sector organizing efforts, the most important thing is to listen to the employers and other partners and then to be flexible. I constantly remind myself to stay focused on the outcomes, and to recognize that there must be a hundred ways to get there. The real goal is to get workers better jobs and to resolve any of the workforce dilemmas that the hospitals have, but to get there, we have to make many adjustments. For example, in one of the hospitals where they have double duty managers, we actually had to make two changes: one was to reduce the frequency of meetings and the other was to find other means of communication and consensus-building. The HR director has been fabulous because she’s played that bridge role and kept people together, which allows the partnership to thrive.

Another key learning is don’t underestimate the power of employees’ needs. What kept one of the hospitals at the table was participating in a focus group of workers who were talking about their excitement at being given the opportunity to learn and focus on their skill training. The education director of the hospital went to the CEO with tears in her eyes and said, “No matter how busy we are, we have to participate in this program.”

Third, although we haven’t figured out the answer to this yet, here’s the question: how do you deliver workplace education in a relatively small organization when drawing workers from three departments simultaneously could jeopardize operations? To address this, we are experimenting with a small classroom tutoring model that doesn’t pull everyone out of housekeeping and food services all at once. Participants attend class together once a week and then they receive tutoring for the rest of the week. I know that some educators would scream about this but what we have to ask is, are people learning this way, and if so that’s what we have to do.