As hospitals struggle to retain staff, one Fort Worth health network bucks the trend
In the wake of an exhausting four years battling the COVID pandemic, hospitals throughout the country are facing immense staffing challenges. Hospital employees are leaving the industry in record numbers, citing burnout from the pandemic and untenable workloads.
But one Fort Worth hospital has bucked the trend: Cook Children’s Health Network, which operates its flagship location in Fort Worth. Its workforce has grown over the course of the pandemic, now with more than 9,700 employees across the entire system. And during an era during which numerous hospitals have turned to contract labor to fill vacancies, the health network hasn’t hired any travel nurses.
The health system’s success, leaders said, is because of a tradition of asking employees what they need, and then giving it to them.
“You can’t do great work unless you’re taken care of,” Beth Schmidt, the network’s vice president of human resources, said. “I believe we do a great job of taking care of our employees.”
In 2022, the health network began an employee listening tour focused on pay and benefits. Over the course of more than 70 listening sessions, leaders heard that Cook Children’s employees wanted a parental leave policy and more days off after a loved one dies. The health network created a parental leave policy giving new parents six weeks of paid leave, Schmidt said. The policy will go into effect this summer. Cook Children’s also decided to absorb the cost of increasing health care premiums for employees, so their insurance premiums wouldn’t increase.
The new changes come in addition to existing programs the health network offers, like onsite child care near its Fort Worth campus and a free medical clinic for employees and their adult dependents.
These policies and others helped propel the health network to a No. 3 ranking on Forbes list of best large employers for 2024. Cook Children’s was ranked No. 1 in the health sector.
The pediatric hospital’s accolades come as many hospitals and other health care facilities are still grappling with fallout from the pandemic. In 2022, the statewide vacancy rate for Texas nurses was 18%, up from 6% three years earlier, according to a survey of about half of hospitals in the state. Nurses and health care workers with major health systems, like Kaiser Permanente, have gone on historic strikes demanding changes in their workplaces.
But these labor disruptions have centered on staffing levels and workload, not pay, as the primary concern, said Michelle Collins, the dean of the College of Nursing and Health at Loyola University New Orleans.
“What we’ve heard from the nurses’ strikes is not necessarily more money,” Collins said.
Cook Children’s facilities were not immune to patient surges that stretched staff to their limits and left patient beds completely full. In fall of 2021 and winter of 2022, the hospital experienced weeks of being completely full, with not enough room for the number of children who needed care.
“We were sending patients to Oklahoma and Illinois and Louisiana,” Schmidt said. Cook Children’s leaders agreed: “This can’t happen again.”
They decided to increase the staffing levels of all units, Schmidt said, and also decided to beef up an existing program that brings additional nurses, respiratory therapists, and other health care workers on staff during the busy winter months. Now, the health network will bring on roughly 100 additional health care workers during the winter months to address the influx of patients during that time.
In addition, the health network has expanded its nursing residency program with two additional cohorts. Leaders also conducted a burnout survey of all staff to learn how they could alleviate staff workload, and ultimately decided to find ways for doctors to spend less time working on electronic medical records, said Keith Holtz, the health network’s chief of administration.
