Children's Healthcare of Atlanta's upcoming Arthur M. Blank Hospital was first imagined in 2015. Now, Linda Matzigkeit, chief administrative officer, has been thinking outside the box about staffing strategies ahead of the new hospital's opening.
Like many healthcare systems, the "great resignation" affected Children's Healthcare of Atlanta, so Ms. Matzigkeit looked to strategies to recruit and retain.
She spoke with Becker's about those efforts including a program to bring moms back into the workforce and the question she asks employees.
Note: This conversation was edited for clarity and length.
Question: What are you most looking forward to in 2024? What are your top priorities this year?
Linda Matzigkeit: We have so much to look forward to, but most notably, we are opening Arthur M. Blank Hospital. It's going to be one of the most advanced pediatric hospitals in the country. It's going to be a 19-story, 2 million-square-foot facility, and we're going to open on Sept. 29 with 446 beds.
It will be the only level 1 pediatric trauma center in the state, and that means our emergency department is open 24/7 and committed to trauma care and injured patients. The facility will have a larger emergency emergency department, more beds to treat our patients, more operating rooms, more specialty beds for heart and cancer patients and just a lot of resources for parents. So it's the most exciting thing that's happened to us in a very long time.
Q: Do you have a timeline of how long it took for this to come about? What prompted this, and what were some of the biggest challenges you encountered with getting this off the ground?
LM: We started talking about it in 2015. We were at capacity on many days and said we need more beds. We have two main hospitals and a smaller hospital today. We started looking at whether we could add on to Scottish Rite or add on to Egleston. When we really looked at the numbers, the only thing that made sense was to build a new hospital where we could add significant beds and have room for future expansion. In 2016, we received approval from our board to move forward and began the planning process. Then in 2020, in July, right in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic we broke ground. Fortunately for us we were able to keep moving in 2020, and originally our plan was to open in 2025. But because we were able to get a lot of work done during COVID-19, we're opening early in 2024.
Q: Between 2015 and now the healthcare landscape and the types of headwinds health systems are facing have massively evolved. How have you addressed any concerns in more recent years while developing this?
LM: Staffing was a real concern of ours. In 2022, with the "great resignation" and when all healthcare systems started seeing a lot of nurses going to travel positions and leaving the profession, we were really concerned about how we'll staff this hospital and these additional beds.
We put teams in place to start working on workforce pipelines. We did things like working with the military, along with another program called MomForce. That is a program that allows moms that have been out of the workforce for some time to come back into it. We expanded that program, and we are having great success with that. Workforce planning has been something that we have been very focused on. We're going to be hiring 1,000 new positions, and we're making great progress, but we had to do a lot of work on our culture and focus on ensuring that we are a place where both clinical and non-clinical staff want to come and work. We have a program that we call our Culture Champions, where a front-line group advises us on what's working, what's not working, and helps us to stay true to our culture.
Q: What areas of the culture do you think have been the hardest to get people on board with?
LM: I think it was really re-establishing our mission. We have a new vision. We added to our values, and we created what we call our employee promise. We were asking employees, "What would you need to make you believe that this is the greatest place ever?"
Then we began to work on addressing those areas. For example, career development was one of the things that came out. We created a career center in 2022, and we have career coaches that staff it. We've had to date 1,600 coaching sessions and 1,000 employees who have used the career center to help find a new opportunity, a different opportunity or just to decide that the career path they're on now is great. So 95% of the employees who have used the career center are still with us.
Q: Going back to the MomForce initiative you mentioned, can you expand a little bit more about that and the advice you have for other hospitals who might want to leverage a similar group?
LM: So MomForce started as a pilot in September of 2013. It's been around for a while, and it was really focused on moms who have been out of the workforce for at least three to five years, but that at one time had a college degree and had been in a position of working, but decided to leave the workforce to stay home with their kids. So it's really trying to get those moms back. Most of them their children are either in college or beyond, and they're looking to re-enter. The program provides an area for them to work in and training on technical skills, communication skills. They come in for 12 weeks and they work in an area and get a lot of training. It's about giving them confidence that they can re-enter the workforce.
Our past cohort had 19 moms, and we hired almost 75% of them. My advice for other hospitals is it's a pretty easy program to implement. There's some salary dollars there, but it really has proven to be a very effective talent pipeline for us.
Q: What are some other healthcare trends that you've been following lately?
LM: I've been following the travel situation, and for us we're down to around 50 travelers in our whole system. So travel nurses and clinical staff. We're trying to make sure that we are managing our labor costs by not having to use travelers and expensive labor. I think labor management is a huge focus for healthcare systems, and that's something that we're looking at as well. We're building relationships with colleges and technical schools for all clinical positions to make sure that we have the future generation. It's not just nursing shortages now. There's shortages in radiology and lab and other clinical areas that we've never seen before. So making sure that we have strong partnerships with the colleges and technical schools so that we are able to help them build more pipelines and more capacity.
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