Recruitment and Retention in Imaging

Eight years of progressive leadership roles on top of 14 years of individual contributor experience, all with the largest healthcare employer in Arizona, have formed the knowledge of what’s important to the healthcare worker in medical imaging, in relation to their ambitions and aspirations.

Many of us have encountered this old attitude within the industry: Get your foot in the door, work hard, sacrifice, and if you are “leadership interested.” with a little bit of luck, you’ll be given the opportunity to demonstrate how you’re willing and able to put all things in life on the back burner for your career.

It is my belief that this approach to career growth and development was not uncommon in most industries prior to 2020. Fast forward to 2023, and the pandemic has obviously caused a culture shift -- a great rethinking of what is important. The past few years essentially erased the approach several prior generations took toward “work.” It is no longer common to see 20-plus-year tenured employees staying with the same organization.

To be clear, I’m speaking about our industry in general here. When a leadership position opens, we are no longer seeing multiple front-line workers vying for the next promotional opportunity. In fact, it is becoming increasingly common to see leadership positions filled by other leaders -- not with the applicable clinical background, but with the hope that their success in leadership in their own field will translate to a foreign one.

Vacancies will often go without candidates for weeks, if not months, on end. So how do we adjust? We still need top candidates to deliver the product of imaging, and top candidates to lead our team through an increasingly complex system in which access, turnaround times, length of stay, quality, and patient throughput are all integral pieces of a patient’s healthcare experience. Medical imaging plays a primary role in that experience, and success requires a team.

When imaging fails to deliver exceptionally in these key performance indicators, the whole system fails. Most importantly the patient suffers.

There is no magic recipe for success in these metrics since success is dependent on people. We have to listen to our people.

Are we listening? Well, we may have an attractive sign-on incentive for a difficult-to-fill position that we have limited candidates. But once we get to connect with the candidate, what are they asking about? Recent common themes tend to include questions about “on-call” schedules, weekend rotations, and holiday expectations. How are we, as imaging leaders, balancing that for our current teams, and how are we conveying to candidates that this balance is important to us as an organization?

Of course, schedules need to be covered and there must be redundant coverage in many 24/7 healthcare settings. Candidates understand this. But how else are we promoting balance?

At the Banner Gateway Medical Center in Gilbert, Arizona, some other efforts we have successfully implemented include reestablishing our relationships with local colleges, to provide clinical rotation access for their students at our hospital which was paused during the pandemic. Additionally, we have considered educational institutions for which to provide clinical rotation; these are organizations we previously had no established relationships.

What about imaging leaders? What are we doing to recruit and retain them? Imaging leaders have it harder than ever, with frequent vacancies in positions where choosing not to staff is simply not a viable option. Next-level imaging leaders are often backfilling the required administrative work of their frontline leaders, as the frontline leaders are often “in the count” upwards of 100% of the time.

So how do we support our imaging leaders so that we can recruit and retain top talent? Again, another good starting point is listening. Even though an imaging leader may not be clinically “in the count,” imaging leaders are on standby 24/7 awaiting the next call out, equipment failure, or department emergency that requires their expertise to successfully navigate.

Is there a way we can offer a balance that does not only include when a leader takes PTO, or when they’re in a “no-cell-service” situation, to offer them a chance to exhale? Our imaging leadership team at Banner Gateway is trialling a version of “administrator on call” which is common at the facility level, but not common at the department level. The intent is to share the “burden” of after-hours and weekend situations that require a leader’s intervention or input spread out amongst a team, so leaders can have periods of downtime/balance when they are not on-site at work.

Additionally, imaging leaders can be tasked with juggling a seemingly impossible amount of plates at the same time. Are we driving a hard expectation that every task must be knocked out of the park? Or do we grant permission to let the “plates” of lower importance occasionally fall while efforts are prioritized to the most critical issues, and offer grace and support in picking up the pieces when appropriate?

These are just some of the considerations of what recruitment and retention look like in imaging for our frontline workers and leaders. Rather than lament the pre-pandemic “live to work” approach to career growth and development, I encourage leaders across our industry to consider embracing the paradigm shift and adjusting to a workforce that values balance and boundaries more than ever.