Five Questions: John Hursh

Q: What does your job entail?

A: I am responsible for recruiting labor for the organization, screening processes that we set up for hiring, for maintaining employee records, managing compensation and benefits, employee relations issues, and more broadly, the work over the long run that will hopefully make us an employer of choice.

Q: How does the Cox system compare to others you’ve worked in?

A: It is a system that I think has tremendous assets. One of the things that attracted me to Springfield was that there are such wonderful facilities for a city this size. You have great physicians, a full array of services, and services you typically find only in major metropolitan areas.

Q: What is the status of the health care worker shortage?

A: The good news is that the number of nurses taking the nursing exams nationally has grown by about 50 percent over the last five years. The bad news is that the rate of growth isn’t enough to account for all the baby boomers that are going to retire in the next five to 10 years. … It will hit every field, but especially in health care because so many of our jobs require very specialized skills.

Q: Is the problem isolated to nursing?

A: No. A lot of the attention has focused on the nursing shortage, but there are similar issues in many of the allied health sciences – laboratory, radiology, physical medicine and pharmacy. It’s like a tsunami – the ocean recedes before the wave hits. What we’ve seen is that some changes in technology have allowed us to reduce length of stay – gall bladder surgery that used to require an inpatient stay of eight days now is overnight surgery. But when you look at the aging population and the demands it will create in years to come, that’s the tsunami out there.

Q: How is Cox trying to deal with the impending shortage?

A: There are some answers to the problem. We need to focus a lot more on maintaining our staff and making this a great place to work. We need to educate the public and students about health care as a career choice, let them know it’s a relatively stable field in terms of employment, and (that) salaries are growing.[[In-content Ad]]