While hospitals and medical facilities rely heavily on their core permanent staff, they also frequently use temporary workers to supplement their workforce needs. These contingent healthcare employees play a vital role in maintaining operations and adequate staffing levels for quality patient care delivery.
Travel Nurses and Doctors
Among the most common temporary healthcare roles are travel nurses and travel doctors contracted from staffing agencies. These experienced professionals get hired for set assignments that last weeks or months at different hospitals facing staffing shortages.
Travel nurses help fill gaps for specialties like ICU, ER, labor/delivery or general medicine floors during busy seasons or leaves of absence. Travel doctors may get pulled in for shift coverage across departments like hospitalists, surgeons, or other in-demand physician roles.
This mobile, temporary clinical workforce provides hospitals with the scheduling flexibility to ramp up staffing and specialty expertise exactly when and where it’s required most.
Per Diem Nurses and Allied Health Temps
Another major temporary staffing need hospitals lean on are per diem nurses and allied health professionals for shift work across nursing units. Common per diem roles include RNs, LPNs, CNAs, patient care techs and medical assistants.
These temporary nursing assistants and aides help supplement facilities’ employee headcounts and handle fluctuating patient volumes and acuity. Per diem lets hospitals save staffing costs by only scheduling these roles as needed for extra coverage during peak hours.
Other allied health temporary workers could include X-ray/Imaging techs, lab assistants and physical therapists. These temps fill openings caused by call-outs, leaves or staffing level adjustments at a moment’s notice.
Medical Scribes
Using temporary medical scribes has become an increasingly popular solution to improve efficiency for physicians. Scribes assist doctors by handling electronic health record (EHR) data entry during patient exams, consultations and procedures.
Rather than providers getting bogged down by EHR documentation duties, medical scribes allow them to devote more focus to interacting with and treating patients. Scribes capture comprehensive clinical notes and coding details in real-time for later physician review and finalization.
Registrars and Front Desk
Facilities often need to temporarily staff up front desk roles for the purpose of maintaining smooth patient flows and registration processes. Temporary registrars, admission representatives, unit clerks, and other guest services positions assist with managing:
- Greeting patients and providing information.
- Patient check-in, paperwork, and data entry into systems.
- Appointment scheduling, referrals, and phone duties.
- Liaising between patients and clinical teams.
These roles require comprehensive training on hospital protocols and systems. Having this temporary staffing pool allows facilities to add registration capacity during busy periods without carrying excess permanent headcount costs.
Medical Billers and Coders
Another key temporary workforce need affects the crucial revenue cycle management operations side of healthcare. As patient volumes fluctuate, facilities must quickly scale their teams processing:
- Medical coding and documentation auditing.
- Insurance billing, claims and denials resolution.
- Accounts receivable and collections efforts.
Having a temp staffing pipeline for experienced medical billers, coders and AR specialists helps hospitals and practices optimize cash flow regardless of changing patient volumes.
Emergency Pandemic Response
Most recently, during the COVID-19 crisis, emergency medical staffing agencies like SouthlandMD became absolutely essential for helping hospitals handle sudden patient surges and staffing level depletion caused by the pandemic.
Temporary travel nurses, respiratory therapists, ER techs and other contingent workers were able to deploy wherever outbreaks emerged across hot spots nationwide. Their flexibility proved vital for urgently addressed severe staffing gaps as caregiving demands spiked.
Conclusion
In normal times and crisis scenarios alike, temporary medical staffing services enable healthcare facilities to access just-in-time skill sets and labor to match evolving patient and operational needs. This contingent workforce model provides organizations indispensable agility for delivering consistently excellent care.
