Staffing Up For The Surge: Expanding The New York City Public Hospital Workforce During The COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

Confronted with the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, New York City Health + Hospitals, the city's public health care system, rapidly expanded capacity across its eleven acute care hospitals and three new field hospitals. To meet the unprecedented demand for patient care, NYC Health + Hospitals redeployed staff to the areas of greatest need and redesigned recruiting, onboarding, and training processes. The hospital system engaged private staffing agencies, partnered with the Department of Defense, and recruited volunteers throughout the country. A centralized onboarding team created a singlesource portal for medical care providers requiring credentialing and established new staff positions to increase efficiency. Using new educational tools focused on COVID-19 content, the hospital system trained twenty thousand staff members, including nearly nine thousand nurses, within a two-month period. Creation of multidisciplinary teams, frequent enterprisewide communication, willingness to shift direction in response to changing needs, and innovative use of technology were the key factors that enabled the hospital system to meet its goals.

The influence of empowered work environments on the psychological experiences of nursing assistants during COVID-19: a qualitative study

“…Moreover, scarcity of resources was a common complaint across hospital systems during this COVID-19 pandemic [3,23]. Important attention to resource stewardship, especially before becoming constrained, expanding the workforce, and staff protection is necessary [24]. Critically, many frontline direct care workers (e.g., NAs) did not receive the same protections and supportive resources that registered nurses and physicians received during the COVID-19 crisis such as housing, discounted transportation, and meals/groceries [2].…”

A Systematic Narrative Review of Comprehensive Preparedness Strategies of Healthcare Resources for a Large Resurgence of COVID-19 Nationally, with Local or Regional Epidemics: Present Era and Beyond

“…Describing approaches falling under six predefined domains, 33 articles specifically focused on preparedness strategies of healthcare resources for the pandemic ( Table 1 ). 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 The final list of selected publications included 3 original articles, 9 commentaries, and 21 review articles. All but six articles were published between 2019 and 2020.…”

“…Public health authorities and each hospital's control tower need to be proactively prepared to expand the supply of personnel. 24 In the short term, alternative sources of staff recruitment include those who have retired recently, returners from non-clinical settings such as research and education, healthcare students, and volunteers. In the long term, the government should develop a system to train competent human resources as medical professionals for the pandemic, including infectious disease specialists, intensive care physicians, intensive care nurses, infection control professionals, and epidemiologists.…”

Breaking Silos: The Team-Based Approach to Coronavirus Disease 2019 Pandemic Staffing

“…Similar to other novel models described during this pandemic ( 2 – 5 ), we spread critical care attending expertise across up to 50 patients at a time and built nontraditional teams around them, based on predefined competencies. In our models, we assigned “Leads” as attendings of record and carefully developed groups of non-ICU “First-Call” and “Second-Call” providers, nurses, and RTs, who worked synergistically to deliver most of the on-the-ground care.…”