If you want to hire hospital staff in 2023, you don’t need us to tell you that finding people is difficult.
Now, imagine adding 800 employees to your existing hospital staff, 200 of whom will fall under your purview as Vice President of Facilities & Support Services. This is the challenge facing Moffitt Cancer Center and our High Reliability guest Terrence Wright, Vice President of Facilities & Support Services at Moffitt.
In July, Moffitt Cancer Center (Tampa) will open a new 10-story, 498,000-square-foot facility with 128 inpatient beds,19 operating rooms, 72 perioperative rooms, three MRI scanners, three CT scanners, and two nuclear cameras. The new hospital will add to Moffitt’s footprint of roughly 3.5 million square feet, which includes a 218-bed hospital and millions of square feet of research and patient care space.
Terrence talks about the challenge of staffing a new hospital while running an existing hospital.
We are scheduled for the first patients to arrive on July 31, 2023, and while that may seem like a lot (of time), we are feeling the crunch. It is a fury of activity. Despite all the pressures we have faced in the market with supply chain, Covid, inflation, and competing for staff, the project has remained on schedule.
The greatest challenge for us right now is staffing the new facility. Recruiting, training, and equipping staff is a heavy lift right now in the market, and we are exploring several strategies to recruit and develop staff. We are working with trade schools, junior colleges, and career development centers; we are trying to develop entry-level programs where we can bring in staff who may not have been exposed to healthcare and try to equip them and educate them on working in and around a healthcare institution.
It is an exciting period, and we really enjoy it, but it is a lot that keeps us up at night.
Listen to the full podcast with Terrence, Staffing challenges for new hospital, here.
Terrence’s Support Services team seeks safety and security, facilities, EVS, and food services, employees. If you are interested in a career at the new Moffitt McKinley Hospital, see here.
G/MA Nuggets
1) Check out the Gosselin/Martin Associates Career Hub!
2) See the roles we are recruiting for here.
3) Follow us on YouTube.
4) Read our recent Facilities Management Survey