Radiology human resources departments will play a pivotal role as practices begin entering the next phase of the country’s response to COVID-19.
HR professionals’ duties will require everything from contacting furloughed employees to delegating screening tasks. But a good place to start this work is by calculating where care levels might land and adjusting accordingly, consulting firm Healthcare Administrative Partners noted in a blog post shared Thursday.
“It is important to first gauge what your workload and volume needs will be when reestablishing your staffing plans. There will be fluctuating volume in the coming months, so do your best to prepare your employees for this,” HAP Chief Revenue Officer Rebecca Farrington wrote June 11.
She offered up seven steps that imaging HR departments can take today to begin their preparations:
1) Gauge volume and workload needs as you begin devising your staffing plans.
2) Contact furloughed and laid-off workers, apprise them of any practice changes, and provide any important documents that need to be filled out. Also, be careful in choosing who to bring back so you do not run afoul of discrimination laws.
3) Establish firm PTO policy, which will become crucial if a staffer has to take time off if a family member contracts COVID. Some may have also been forced to use vacation time, and HR should set expectations and be prepared to address time-off requests.
4) Get ahead of safety concerns and devise a response, in the event that there is pushback. All employees should be informed about any new safety protocols and cleaning, “so they feel safe and conformable resuming work,” Farrington noted.
“Make sure they are prepared to be flexible and step up to handle tasks they might not have done in the past. Repurposing will be critical to ensuring you’re able to capture all possible volume,” she added.
5) Delegate screening tasks so that you know who will be responsible for taking temperatures on a daily basis in the practice. Or another option is having individuals take their own temps twice a day and create a system to report and store this data confidentially.
6) Devise a policy on how to react in the event that screening shows a staffer has a fever. HR should be ready to discuss next steps to enter quarantine and when they might return to work. Leaders should also consider sending daily text messages to individuals, allowing them to self-report any changes in health, before showing up sick for their shift.
You can read more of HAP’s advice for radiology HR departments here.
Marty Stempniak has covered healthcare since 2012, with his byline appearing in the American Hospital Association's member magazine, Modern Healthcare and McKnight's. Prior to that, he wrote about village government and local business for his hometown newspaper in Oak Park, Illinois. He won a Peter Lisagor and Gold EXCEL awards in 2017 for his coverage of the opioid epidemic.