Aggressive recruiting key for Washoe Med

With nursing shortages and all, it's difficult enough these days to fill vacancies that arise from routine turnover in hospital staffs.

Try staffing an entirely new hospital while you're at it.

Washoe Health System, which is on schedule to open its Washoe Medical Center South Meadows early next year, will add about 170 people to its staff with the new hospital.

Approximately 230 people currently work at the system's south-Reno facilities, which include services such as assisted living.

Some of those staff members will move to the south-Reno hospital from downtown's Washoe Medical Center or from other health system facilities around the region, said Kayalene Opperman, a registered nurse who serves as manager of recruitment for Washoe Health System.

But the health system still needs to recruit aggressively to staff the new facility and to prepare for other expansion that's on the books.

A recruitment task force is beginning work to get a handle on the total recruitment needs of Washoe Health System over the next decade or so.

At the same time, however, Opperman and her staff have launched what they call "Operation Hire Power," an effort to further increase Washoe's external recruitment.

A big piece of that effort, Opperman said, is recruitment in northern California of registered nurses and other clinical staff.

About 60,000 direct-mail pieces encouraging medical professionals to give Washoe a look are headed toward the Golden State.

The health organization also has stepped up its commitment to use of the Internet as a recruiting tool.

Opperman said Washoe Health System is running ads on Web sites that draw big readership from nurses.When nurses click through a banner ad, they're directed to Washoe's recruitment Web site.

Those fine-tuned advertising efforts, Opperman said, reflect work by Washoe Health System and its ad agency, R&R Partners, to gather more information about the ways that job-seekers learn about openings at the Reno organization.

But even the most effective advertising campaign, she said, can't replace the personal relationships recruiters build with medical professionals.

"It's all about relationships," Opperman said.

In some cases, those relationships develop over decades.Washoe Health System works with grammar schools in the region to interest youngsters in health-related careers.

Nursing students at the University of Nevada, Reno, are provided numerous opportunities to pursue their clinical studies at Washoe Medical Center, and the organization actively recruits new graduates from UNR's nursing program.

At the same time,Washoe's team of recruiters seeks to build relationships with experienced medical professionals across the country, encouraging them to make the decision to relocate to Reno.

The pitch is simple, Opperman said: Washoe Health System provides the sort of challenges and opportunities to work at the cutting edge of the profession that ordinarily are found only in metropolitan areas.

It does so, however, in a place with a quality of life that residents can brag about.

For all the energy that Washoe Health System puts into its recruiting effort, Opperman said retention of current employees is just as important to meeting the organization's staffing needs.

After all, efforts to build a larger staff are doomed if existing staff walks out the back door faster than new professionals walk in the front.

Newly hired nurses, especially those who only recently graduated from nursing school, are a particular focus at Washoe Health System.

"They feel lost.

They don't feel connected to the people in their units.

So they move on," Opperman said.

To battle that turnover,Washoe Health System has devoted an experienced registered nurse fulltime to listening to young nurses, helping them get their feet on solid ground.

The opening of Washoe Medical Center South Meadows means, too, that Opperman and her staff have stepped up their recruiting for non-medical positions administration, billing and others short-staffed as nursing and other medical positions, Opperman said the positions aren't easy to fill.

"We're really particular in our hiring," she explained.

As part of its recruiting effort, Washoe Health System last week conducted two job fairs at the South Meadows facility, events designed to find new workers systemwide.

The 116,000-square-foot Washoe Medical Center South Meadows is the first new acute-care hospital to open in the Truckee Meadows in two decades.

Along with a 51,000-square-foot diagnostic and treatment pavilion that will include emergency rooms and surgery facilities, a construction project at the facility includes a 60,000-square-foot medical office building near Double R Boulevard.

The hospital is south of South Meadows Parkway at the east side of U.S.

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