VALLEY CITY, N.D. (CHI) – The following is a news release from CHI Mercy Hospital in Valley City.
“With the introduction of COVID-19 back in 2020, we saw an overwhelming need for health care workers on a national and global scale. With the significant rise in critical patients we watched staff- burnout plague healthcare organizations. We have also been and continue to experience a nationwide nursing shortage, where the demand for nurses will surpass the supply colleges and universities are able to provide. All of these factors combined have put healthcare systems at risk and patient populations potentially in harm’s way.
One saving grace through this time period was traveling nursing staff. These nurses are able to travel around the country providing nursing care to hospitals in need. They are able to help fill gaps in schedules, which in turn keeps hospital doors open. Even though this was a great resource to use in our time of need, there were some disadvantages to travel staff as well. We have found it is more cost effective to hire and retain staff than to rely on travelers who are not permanent fixtures in our facilities.
With the hiring of Ryan Fowler, CHI Mercy Hospital of Valley City’s President, there was a major push to reduce traveling staff members in our facility. Ryan spearheaded an initiative to hire our own staff members again in Valley City so we wouldn’t have to depend on traveling agencies to staff our hospital. The organization came together to create a plan on how we were going to make this happen.
We started this process by working with the local Economic Development team consisting of Jennifer Feist and Kara Anderson. They helped us get in contact with the local Job Service pages to promote our open positions, they posted our job listings on their Indeed page, and helped us with key points to touch on for job descriptions. We worked on increasing our posting on our own social media and Indeed pages. With this we have seen a lot of success!
In the past two months we have hired 13 new people to different positions around the facility. This has been a variety of professionals including nurses, certified nursing assistants, cooks, radiology technicians, and a new director of Human Resources. Many of these people have come from other areas looking to work in Valley City. We even have a new international nurse who has come to our community with her family from the Philippines.
The hospital would like to thank our Economic Development team for their efforts in helping us hire this significant amount of people in such a small amount of time. We want to thank our employees who worked together to come up with a plan and executed it well. We also want to thank Job Service ND for posting our open positions on “Barnes County Featured Jobs of the Day.”