River Cities Business Journal: Health

River Cities Business Journal

BULLHEAD CITY- As the county grows, area hospitals are in a never-ending search for skilled employees to fill their needs.

At Western Arizona Regional Medical Center certain positions are always in demand.

“We do a lot of recruitment because there is such a demand for registered nurses, radiology technicians and lab technicians,” WARMC Human Resources Director Tom Harrison said. “There is a great demand and not the supply.”

Registered nurses are one of the areas that Harrison is always recruiting for, he said.

“Recruiting registered nurses for permanent placement is probably the biggest challenge,” Harrison said. “We try to be competitive with the area. Nursing salaries are quite good right now. There is a turnover problem everywhere with nurses because they have become so mobile. Twenty years ago they would get a job and stay there, but now they are very mobile.”

Despite nearly always being short of nurses on a permanent basis, the hospital never is short of the nursing staff it needs to serve its patients, Harrison said.

“For temporaries we pull from the whole area,” Harrison said. “When we don't have the number of nurses we want we have to bring in temporaries to make sure we give the quality care that we need.”

Some of the demands for skilled labor can be filled locally, Harrison said.

“We run ads all the time and we get people all the time from local ads,” Harrison said. “There is somewhat of a pool, but it is not as large as we'd like it to be.”

But, the majority of recruiting is don't outside the area.

“We advertise in trade publications. We use recruiters locally from the hospital and from outside the hospital,” Harrison said. “We do Internet ads. We do job fairs and go to colleges.”

The Internet has proven to be a valuable resource for the hospital.

“The professionals are very much Internet oriented,” Harrison said. “It is playing a much bigger role than it used to.”

The most difficult recruiting area is for doctors, though.

“You are always in a recruitment mode trying to get physicians to come to the community,” Harrison said. “The more physician s you have the better you serve the community>”