Earl Dalton is the Chief Clinical Officer at Health Carousel and the new President of the National Association for Travel Health Organizations (NATHO) – the ethical guardrail for healthcare staffing agencies, equal parts arbiter of peer-led best practices and a place for feedback and friendship. Earl spent most of his career in nursing and nursing leadership. His career was patient care long before it was executive administration, and the ethos that every number is a name, every chart a human reflection, pervades his decision-making and approach to work.
Our conversation with Earl was a conversation around how hospitals and the healthcare staffing agencies they partner with can finally lock arms and realize that they’re all trying to solve the same problem and do so ethically and efficiently.
But it seems like we’ve got a pretty big communication problem.
We’ve spoken to quite a few hospital and facility administrators, many of whom have a polite but suspicious view of healthcare staffing agencies. The prevailing, if perhaps outwardly unspoken, opinion is that they’re vendors, that all they can provide is staff augmentation, and that they perpetuate high bill rates so that they can profit off of patient care needs and an increasingly desperate healthcare system at a breaking point.
And we’ve spoken to hundreds and hundreds of healthcare staffing leaders who are frustrated by hospitals and facilities who they say ignore them, push them into a narrow lane of staff augmentation when they are fully capable of being much more elevated, strategic partners, and financially thrive in a post-COVID system while healthcare staffing agencies contemplate the new normal.
The irony is that no one is winning right now. Hospitals are fortunate to have 2% margins and clinicians are burning out at a rapid pace and still suffer under the weight of staff shortages, increasing care burdens and complexities, and healthcare deserts. Healthcare staffing agencies are also running on razor-thin margins through MSP business and demand fluctuations, and labeled by clients as transactional, but also stiff-armed out of opportunities to offer more consultative, elevated partnership value.
This conversation with Earl addresses: the challenges both healthcare staffing agencies and facilities face; what needs to change in each industry to enable stronger and more functional partnerships; the role of technology in healthcare and how to keep it in ethical perspective; and why executive leadership feels a lot like refereeing a kids’ hockey game.
Check out the full episode below or on Apple Podcasts.