Vaya Workforce Think Tank Recap

Day 1

The Vaya Think Tank brings together some of the nation’s top healthcare leaders from premier health systems across the nation to discuss and collaborate on solutions to the workforce challenges facing the industry today. This year’s event at the Boulders Resort & Spa in Scottsdale, Arizona, started with a fireside chat led by nurse economist Shawna Butler and a panel including Vizient Executive Principal Eric Burch, Former SVP of Learning and Organization Development at CommonSpirit Health Tracey Pierce, Senior Director at Sg2 Janelle Kwan and Vizient Advisory Solutions Principal Kerry Poole.

The panel shared the recurring themes they’ve encountered when developing solutions with healthcare organizations to sustain the nursing workforce. In essence, employees need to feel like organizations care for them by providing:

• Flexibility and transparency
• Safety and security
• Career paths with opportunities where they can grow professionally
• Support from leadership, the education department and colleagues

The panel encouraged attendees to think about the steps they can take to improve the lives of their employees. One little step to improve their employees' experience can change the industry, patient lives and the whole world for the better.

Day 2

The day began with an introductory session led by Butler and Vaya Workforce’s SVP of Strategy and Fulfillment Melanie Bell covering how challenges for healthcare staffing were exacerbated by the pandemic and while there have been improvements in nurse well-being and job perception in the last year, staff vacancy continues to increase. To combat this, the Think Tank focused on four key areas to ensure nurses are working at the top of their scope:

• Flexible staffing
• Team delivery models
• Reducing documentation
• Automation/AI

Attendees broke out into these four workforce strategy groups to develop a project charter for implementing said strategy at their organization. Butler emphasized the need for attendees to engage nurses in the problem-solving process when designing their charters. Each strategy group collaborated with participants sharing their workforce challenge and their colleagues then provided examples of successful workforce solutions that had worked for them.

The consensus from attendees was that they felt motivated and energized by the discussions they had and that they were very confident to take on implementing the change laid out by their project charter at their organizations.