Physician recruiters work hard to plan ahead and ensure seamless and uninterrupted medical staffing coverage for their hospitals—but it’s hard to plan for the things you can’t see coming. That’s where locum tenens can help.
While recruiters can plan ahead for predictable events like maternity leave or planned vacations, it’s the unforeseen events—family emergencies, injury, illness, burnout or unexpected turnover—that can throw any medical staffing team for a loop.
In the healthcare industry, it’s essential for recruiters to have trusted and dependable partners they can call upon when unforeseen circumstances arise, and know they’ll receive the care and attention that they need. These partnerships are vital, as they can be the difference between an emergency need being filled, or a department going without coverage.
At Hayes Locums, we have built our reputation on being exactly that: a trusted partner who has the expertise, flexibility, and dedication to fill even your most unpredictable staffing needs.
Here’s how Hayes Locums can support your medical staffing team:
- Understanding your needs from the outset
We know that you can’t leave emergency situations up to algorithms. That’s why we treat each job opening with the same urgency we would if it was our own facility.
Our ability to come through for our clients comes down to human connection: we take the time to get to know each of our facilities and build true partnerships with them, so that when healthcare recruiters reach out to us with an urgent request for coverage, we have all the information we need to immediately jump into action.
By taking the time to get to know each facility, and asking the right questions about their needs, we set ourselves up so we can successfully deliver qualified providers, when you need them most.
- Developing a trusted pipeline of providers through relationships
We place a high priority on being a trusted partner to our facility clients. Part of how we’ve earned that trust is because we have a pipeline of qualified, credentialed physicians that we can confidently call upon to fill emergency needs.
When a fast break comes in—what we define as any job with under a month’s lead time—it doesn’t just go on a job board on the internet. Instead, our team of specialty-specific providers already has a shortlist of providers that we know are licensed within a particular state, and whose experience fits the needs of a facility. And, because we’ve built trust with those providers, we can often get creative with them on how we can work together to meet the needs of the facility.
To understand providers qualifications well ahead of time, we ask that they complete our internal credentialing process even before they’re booked for an assignment. That means we have the documentation needed for hospital credentialing, so we’re able to jump in right away to help pre-populate hospital applications or medical license applications more accurately, thus relieving the burden on the provider and speeding up the process for the hospital’s medical staff office.
In an emergency situation, every day, every hour, every minute counts. Our credentialing process helps us move more quickly to deliver you a qualified physician (or provider) candidate, that you can feel confident entrusting with your patients.
- Relying on our specialized expertise
Our teams are made up of specialty-specific consultants. That means they know the specifics and industry trends of their respective medical specialties.
Because of that built-in expertise, when a client calls us with an emergency need for a certain specialist, our consultants know exactly what questions to ask to identify the clinical scope of the role, what kind of support you have in-house, and other crucial details that will help us find quality providers. From there, we can move quickly, because we’re confident we know what the need is and can easily find the physicians to fill it.
The focused nature of our teams means that each consultant develops an understanding of both the scope of the specialty and the provider trends within that specialty, so they can easily narrow down their pool of providers to find great candidates for the job.
- Working collaboratively to deliver your provider on time
The collaborative approach between our consultants and our support teams is one of the main reasons we’re able to deliver candidates in urgent situations. Each of these teams—credentialing, licensing, travel—all work hand in hand with the consultant and the assignment coordinator to deliver each physician to their assignment on time, with the required paperwork completed.
Every support team has their own area of expertise that can significantly speed up the process. Knowing how long each step of the process takes enables us to give you a realistic timeframe. Plus, the relationships each team has built with their side of the industry—from licensing boards to rental car agencies—means that we know who to speak with to get things done quickly.
That expertise also extends to the clients themselves: each facility that we work with has a designated credentialing specialist that knows the ins and outs of that facility’s requirements. So when a job comes in that we have four weeks to fill, that specialist already knows the specific requirements for that facility. They work with the facility MSO to get all of the necessary paperwork completed—in the right order and by the right date.
Having that working knowledge from the very beginning eliminates so much of the unknown, so we can jump through all the hoops involved in a last-minute locums assignment as efficiently as possible.
- Delivering continuous operational support, beyond the assignment
Our support goes beyond the assignment. An important part of our partnership with facilities is making sure that we regularly touch base with medical staffing offices to talk through how the process went: what went well, and what could have gone better. Building those relationships with individual facilities is how we constantly improve, and gain a deeper understanding of each facility’s unique needs and processes.
There’s a concept I heard about while watching a professional basketball game—a stabilizing force. Someone who doesn’t necessarily score the most points, but helps facilitate the flow of the offense. That’s what we aim to be at Hayes Locums: the stabilizing force that helps facilitate all of the different pieces that are required to successfully deliver quality providers when our clients need them most.
