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Employer Quotes
The quotes below are from employers in this industry: Health Care
They are talking about this topic: Workforce Trends & Challenges
The quotes below are about this issue:
Future skills needed include the ability to work with geriatric populations with complex conditions and multiple diagnoses. Technological and IT skills, including patient care through telemedicine, will also be very important. Others mention leadership skills and more RNs in long-term care. For lab techs, they predict the need for more advanced training and molecular understanding.
| "Back to the question of, 'In three years, which skills do you want to see people coming in with?' Another respondent mentioned the multiple morbidities. I think that if students were to get better skills while in school for managing multiple morbidities, then they would be a little more confident in their job skills when they get here. And another thing that we haven't talked about yet today is managing chaos effectively. An acute care nurse will have two to four, maybe six, patients on their care load. My nurses will have 28. That is a chaotic eight-hour shift. And if you are not able to keep all of those balls in the air you are going to go nuts." | Central |
| "It has to be the answer in more rural areas. It's just far too difficult to recruit physicians into rural communities and the rural lifestyle after they've been absorbed within large urban areas as a part of medical school. It just costs too much to pull them out. And so PAs and NPs—with telemedicine connections—are in the future." | Central |
| "I have the same thing. I have a memory care unit. I have 49 apartments. That's one nurse per 49 dementia patients. It's kind of the same thing, its case management. Like home health care, it's case management. You are on your own. You have to figure it out. You don't have that nurse next to you that you can ask, 'What can I do?' I can't do that when I'm case managing by myself." | Central |
| "We are going to need to expand the care we offer without any additional dollars. We are going to have to figure out more cost-effective ways of providing that care. And I think the level of providers is going to be one of the answers—it's one of the things that we're going to have to continue to expand." | Central |
| "The whole information technology and electronic medical records—those information technology specialists—that's an area where we are also competing with private non-health-care industry. And just being able to afford to retain people in those job families—whether it be data gathering, or implementing and building the electronic medical record—it's really become a critical job family for us. And we're also starting to hear about the shortage that's anticipated in the coding area with the implementation of ICD-10. So, those are some of the job families that are kind of on our radar right now for the next one to three years." | Central |
| "Some clinics are still paper-based, but there's a push towards the electronic medical record. And now, there's even a push that wherever you go, wherever you receive care as a patient, no matter what institution, that your medical record follows you, and that health care professionals have easy exchange of this health information. Some of us struggle with our hospitals and clinics to get us all connected. But I think that—and I would think this holds true for the nursing population as well—that having the IT savviness would be helpful. The people that are building interfaces may not understand the health care portion of it, and that leads to problems with the build. And IT services are very expensive, so you don't want to have to re-do them. But with the nurses coming out of school, and needing to use the EMR, and to chart everything electronically, I think that the new grads do it better than those of us that are used to using the paper. It is very complex. And, boy, if you are an RN and you also have the IT piece of it—or if you are a laboratorian and you know the IT piece of it—then you can really leverage that. And you will be able to leverage it even more in the future, I believe, than you can right now." | Metro |
| "If I look at who I hire five years from now for lab testing—it's molecular, it's DNA-based, it's RNA-based. It's all of those things we learned—that I learned—as a cytotechnologist. So, we need good folks that can sit and do that work even while their work is becoming more complicated in terms of a molecular-based level." | Metro |
| "In terms of the future of long-term care, I think that we're going to be seeing more hiring of RNs than LPNs with the complexities that are going be in our care facilities. The LPN skills aren't going to be applicable anymore—I mean, yes, for a certain piece of it, but we're going to be needing more RNs." | Metro |
| "And there will be a growth in geriatric populations within our health care staff, too, so you have a twofold geriatric dimension." | Metro |
| "I think, in the next five years, the communication skills and the technological skills are going to be very key." | Northeast |
| "I'd have more geriatric information and more geriatric training across the board. Because, even if we're not focusing on the last two or three years of life, across the board, you're going to have older, more chronic, more complicated cases when patients present." | Northeast |
| "We need to be open and ready and willing for those technological changes because it may be that people will eventually be using their phones to take pictures of their arm and then showing those photos to their doctor via their television" | Northeast |
| "When folks present, they're going to present with more complicated and more serious issues. And probably more geriatric. So, that kind of specialty information is important, whether it's a class along the way or even a special focus." | Northeast |