Will 2017 Be The Year Of On-Demand Nurses As A Service To Society?

With a changing of the political guard, the inevitable repeal of “Obamacare,” and the equally inevitable roll out of a replacement we hope will at the minimum serve as a safety net for millions who may be left with no medical insurance – we in the healthcare industry can’t wait to see what happens next.

But one trend nobody can argue with is the accelerating growth of “freelance” nurses, the agencies who help place them, and the natural demand driving growth across the board.

As the population grows, as the population ages and lives longer, as the transformation of healthcare and related systems accelerates, having flexibility in staffing is more important than ever.

In addition, increasingly sophisticated surgical techniques, new pharmaceuticals in parallel with a constantly growing interesting in integrative health, and the inability to keep up with demand for rooms and beds in hospitals and skilled nursing facilities is causing new models to emerge, models which are perfectly suited for the “freelance economy” for nurses and other healthcare professionals.

In my next blog, I will write about the new economics and how interim staffing can make the difference between profitable and unprofitable operations of clinics, ambulatory care, traditional hospitals, medical centers, rehab facilities and more. For so many reasons, 2017 will be a banner year for on-demand nurses and in closing, I’d like to pass along this great article that ran on Health Leaders Media, written by Lena J. Weiner and based largely on an interview with Patricia Pittman, PhD, codirector of the GW Health Workforce Institute at George Washington University.

The article includes this: