Staffing concerns, telehealth questions and vaccine status disrupt ophthalmology practices
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WAILEA, Hawaii — Staffing disruptions, questions around telehealth and the vaccination status of office staff are questions practice managers are contending with a year into the COVID-19 pandemic.
“When we went down, we got more efficient. Our culture kind of tightened up a little bit,” Patti Barkey, COE, said in a panel discussion at Hawaiian Eye 2021. Decisions were made about which staff to retain, lay off or furlough.
“We learned from this that we were actually overstaffed,” William B. Trattler, MD, said. In May 2021, Trattler’s staff is operating with about 25% fewer employees than before the pandemic.
It has been difficult to hire back all the employees who were laid off during the pandemic.
“I think this is a trend across all industries right now,” James D. Dawes, MHA, CMPE, COE, said. “We’re seeing and reading stories all the time about the inability to recruit, because everyone kind of took a year off and hung out at home and watched a lot of Netflix and still got paid something, so it is really hard to get those people back.”
To replace necessary staff, practices need to understand the competitive nature of the current job market.
“I think it would be really difficult to find a good front office person right now, when they can work at Starbucks for $15. I think the competition is very real. Everybody needs to step up their game on the recruitment side of things and learn how to recruit correctly, interview correctly and have really sound processes in place for people who want to apply for a job with you,” Dawes said.
“People are changing their stance on remote workers,” Dawes said.
However, not every position or responsibility is translatable to remote work, and physicians are not ready to jump toward full telehealth.
“I’m not a fan of telehealth at all. It’s a lot of work. It’s just as much paperwork as far as documenting in your EMR system, but you don’t get all the information,” Trattler said. “I think for chalazion, it’s perfect. If someone wants to send me a picture of their stye, I can see that, but that’s about it.”
Hybrid approaches for ophthalmic telehealth applications “make no sense” either, Trattler said, because patients are still required to come to the office on some level.
As more of the public receives vaccinations for COVID-19, some patients may ask about the vaccination levels of the office staff and physicians.
“I’ve told my staff, you can answer the question honestly. Just say what you want, keep it short because you don’t want to get into opinions,” Barkey said, adding that she does not require her employees or physicians to be vaccinated.
“There’s this fundamental disagreement over whether you can require any employee to get a vaccine, given it is only authorized under the emergency use authorization right now from the FDA,” Allison W. Shuren, MSN, JD, said. “Then you have the whole issue of once you require it, how do you document it? Do you really actually want all of that information on your employees? So, it’s a double-edged sword, as well.”
“At this point, we made it. We’re healthy, we’re living the dream. I don’t know if it’s a dream or a nightmare, but we’re living it,” Barkey said.
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Barkey P, et al. Panel discussion: How we survived and what positive changes have come out of our experiences. Presented at: Hawaiian Eye; May 8-14, 2021; Wailea, Hawaii.
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