In Need of Help, Medical Center Offers Flexible Hours to Woo Older Workers

Six years ago, Darlene Stone, vice president of human resources for Leesburg Regional Medical Center, in

central Florida, faced a daunting task. The nonprofit center planned to open a new hospital in a nearby town, The Villages, and it asked her to find 500 employees.

Given the shortage of health-care workers, both in Florida and nationwide, Ms. Stone knew that she could not use traditional recruiting methods. “We said, Okay, we’re going to have to get very, very creative,” she says.

The new facility, The Villages Regional Hospital, was built in the heart of a planned retirement community, where the average age is 76 — and Ms. Stone and her colleagues decided to view the residents as a pool of potential workers.

“We had to let the community members know that we are open to employing you,” she says. “There’s a perception out there that because of my age, I’m not employable.”

Array of Options

The organization designed a program to recruit workers age 50 and older, both in The Villages and elsewhere, offering extremely flexible working conditions as the bait. Ms. Stone says that was critical because many older workers do not want full-time jobs.

She explained the approach: “You want to work six hours, we’re going to accommodate that. You want to work four hours — great, we can use you here. Eight-hour, 10-hour shifts. Monday through Friday only. Weekends only. You live up north, you can work six months for us during the winter months and go back up north when it gets steamy here in Florida.”

The center started working with the retirement community as it recruited residents from Northern states. “They can literally come to look for housing and have an employment offer before they go back,” Ms. Stone says.

Recruiters discuss with applicants what kind of benefits, training, and work they would like, and tailor jobs to them. One nurse, for example, had been out of the profession for 20 years, so the organization paid for her to take a refresher course, Ms. Stone says. Another had earned a C.P.A. and an M.B.A., and wanted to use them, so it created a new position for her — director of revenue cycle, where she oversees functions like case management and admissions.

The medical facilities use the same approach with existing employees. An emergency-room nurse decided she wanted to wind down, so it found her a part-time job working weekends as a triage aide, Ms. Stone said.

The result? The percentage of employees 50 and older has grown over the last five years from 33 percent to 42 percent at both facilities — 48 percent at The Villages hospital alone. The annual turnover rate has fallen from 28 or 29 percent in the late 1990s to about 14 percent today, Ms. Stone says. And the vacancy rate for nurses is less than 3 percent at The Villages hospital, and about 4 percent at the Leesburg center — compared with 10 percent when Ms. Stone arrived in 2000. She calls the figure “tremendous,” given the country’s severe nursing shortage.

Ms. Stone says it took time for some managers to get used to the new, flexible hiring. “We [spent] a lot of time hand-holding and praying, saying we can get you through this,” she says. “Guess what? A 12-hour shift can be broken down into three four-hour shifts, it really works.”

After five years, she says, “it’s just almost natural.”