01 Nov How Healthcare Hiring Agencies Ensure Flexible Schedules
Most nurses join agencies to enjoy their host of benefits: much better pay, career support, and of course, schedule flexibility. Schedule flexibility is vital to nurses’ work-life balance. It ensures they stay fulfilled within their crucial role in healthcare and society by mitigating burnout and its risks. When nurses feel burnt out or suffer compassion fatigue, they’re more likely to make mistakes, take more time off, or even quit.
Flexible scheduling is an enormous part of increasing the nursing profession’s retention rate. It’s why most agencies are so set on building nurses’ workflows around what they love and would like from their agency healthcare work journey. After all, when nurses are happy, agencies and patients are happy.
Read on for a deep dive into how healthcare recruitment agencies ensure flexible schedules for HCAs, RNs, and allied healthcare professionals like support workers.
How Do Agencies Ensure Healthcare Workers Have Flexible Schedules?
By flexible schedules, we mean the ability to choose when you work and where. Choosing when you work, such as purely on weekdays or only during the day, ensures you have enough downtime to recuperate and recharge so you can give your best on your next shift.
Flexible Shifts
If you’ve worked with an agency before, you’ll know that the recruitment team usually gives you a ring when they have a shift available, and you can whether you take it–unlike healthcare booking agencies. Healthcare booking agencies mandate that you take shifts, no matter whether you’re busy or physically cannot, lest they drop you as a candidate.
At Proximity Healthcare, we always ask when you would prefer to work and offer you shifts based on the preferences you’ve communicated to us.
Negotiating
Some agencies, like Proximity Healthcare, are happy to negotiate with a healthcare facility on your behalf for the shifts you would like. Say you only want to work 3 12-hour shifts a week starting from the morning. An agency like ours would liaise with the facility to talk you up–in a way, sell you–so they agree to the sifts you would like. If a facility feels you are of enough value to their team, they usually agree to the shifts we ask for. This is why having practical training (part of the compliance process) and heaps of work experience is important. It makes you stand out from other candidates, so much so that a healthcare facility would bend over backwards to accommodate you.
How Proximity Healthcare Ensures Your Schedule Is Flexible
Proximity Healthcare firmly believes in taking sufficient time off, having work-life balance, and having agency (get it?) in your nursing career. Without it, many nurses feel trapped in a role and that they can’t leave, which is why NHS retention rates are plummeting and the healthcare economy is so bad.
If you would like to have flexible shift times and take control of your nursing schedule, contact Proximity Healthcare. We’ll do our very best to accommodate the working hours you would like.