The world has been changed greatly by the COVID-19 pandemic. The world was shut down, or came close to it, at various points during the last few years, leaving healthcare professionals floundering for the best way to help their patients. Some of the changes that have occurred have made the life of a healthcare employer harder. With work-life balance becoming a high priority for most healthcare professionals in the face of a rising wave of burnout and physicians being in high demand due to the ongoing shortage, there are a great many new challenges that providers will have to reckon with in 2022.

Here are the 4 largest challenges healthcare providers must prepare for in 2022.

Staffing Problems
Given the ongoing shortage of medical professionals, staffing issues have become the highest priority for most practices and are likely to remain so for the foreseeable future. People are leaving healthcare; the reasons include burnout-induced retirement, low salaries, poor work environments, and a variety of other dissatisfactions with the field. This mass exodus of medical workers leaves those left behind with a great deal more work to continue providing the same quality of care and maintain an efficient practice, which runs the risk of them following their former colleagues out the door.

Employee retention has become the highest priority. What we’ve learned from the pandemic is that employees require a great deal of support from their employers to continue performing at their best, and this was especially important in healthcare where the employees in question were on the frontlines of the fight against a deadly pandemic. Practices must invest in providing employees the necessary support, strengthening their team-building efforts, and improving employee engagement through recognition programs across the board.

Recruitment
Recruitment is not a new concern for most practices, being an extremely high priority even among the best of times. However, with medical professionals across the nation stretched thin due to understaffing issues, recruitment has taken on even greater importance than before. Finding the right staff to recruit has also become harder, with careers in healthcare no longer holding the same appeal as they did before.

So, practices must be proactive in looking for the candidates they want to recruit and offering them terms that make the job worthwhile. Expanding benefits, sign-on bonuses and industry-competitive salaries are among the best ways to ensure you can secure the best staff, though these methods can be prohibitively expensive.

For practices whose budgets do not allow for simply throwing more money at staff, other options include offering training and development opportunities and more inclusive staff.

Funding
With practice revenues yet to fully recover to pre-COVID levels, providers must make some tough decisions on which areas warrant the most investment. Technology is the most important area, of course, as falling behind technological advancements can quickly make a practice obsolete. Technology is also expensive, however, and making these investments means practices will have to cut back in other areas.

Gifts, holidays, bonuses, staff lunches, and other forms of employee appreciation will be first on the chopping block for most practices. This may seem like the best option; however, it is important to consider that employees will not agree with that assessment. HR will have to find other ways to keep employees happy and satisfied.

Staff turnover is another expense that practices cannot afford. HR and practice management must find a way to balance the recruitment and training of new employees with other expenses, without eating up the entire budget.

Changing Laws
In September 2021, 36 healthcare-related laws went into effect in Texas. This is just one egregious example of the many sudden legal changes that practices have to be prepared to navigate. With so many laws changing so suddenly, HR will find it hard to maintain compliance and training, among other challenges.