Every year, The American Hospital Association (AHA) promotes the National Hospital Week campaign to pay homage to hospital-based healthcare workers who elevate the needs of others above their own and work tirelessly to care for patients. This year’s event runs from Sunday, May 7, to Saturday, May 13.
In our locum tenens news coverage for the past three years, Locumpedia has regularly celebrated the honorable work of locum tenens providers at hospitals despite the twists and turns of the most difficult public health crises in more than 100 years. This week, we take time to honor the non-clinical staff who make it possible for clinicians to heal the sick and save lives.
- 6.3 million people in the US work in the healthcare industry
- There are more than 5,000 hospitals, healthcare systems, networks
- 1,796 rural hospitals provide critical life-saving care in regions where healthcare is often limited
- In 2022, hospital workers served more than 33 million patients
The #WeAreHealthcare theme this year stresses the central importance of hospitals to the healthcare industry and underscores that many hospital workers consider theirs a calling instead of just a career. Hospital workers are summoned each day, at all hours, to the frontlines of community service. They endure long shifts away from friends and family and are thrust into high-stress situations, often making split-second decisions that can mean the difference between life and death.
“Our caregivers have taken on unimaginable challenges and have risen to the occasion repeatedly,” The AHA says. “We think it is essential that others see the impact hospitals have made on communities, especially in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.”
Did You Know?
Before it gained its own week of recognition, National Hospital Day was first celebrated on May 12, 1921, to promote confidence and trust in the hospital system after the Spanish Flu pandemic. This time of year coincides with Florence Nightingale’s birthday, who is known as the founder of modern nursing in America. In 1953, Hospital Day was extended to a weeklong celebration to allow more time for public education about hospitals. Additionally, National Nurses Week, which runs May 6-12, coincides with the celebration.
The Essential Role of Locum Tenens in Healthcare
The last three-plus years have been a difficult period for the healthcare industry, to put it mildly. The pandemic exerted an enormous strain on the healthcare system, which inevitably supercharged existing issues surrounding burnout and staffing shortages. But hospitals continue to find impressively creative solutions to staff their teams and provide vital services to the community through solutions such as locum tenens coverage.
The long-term commitment of a full-time employee can sometimes be prohibitively time-consuming and costly, and locum tenens physicians and advanced practice providers have emerged as a strategic solution for staffing shortages that hospitals are embracing rather than seeing them as a necessary evil.
CHG Healthcare’s “2023 State of Locum Tenens Report” notes that approximately 50,000 physicians worked at least one locum tenens assignment in the past year, a number that is only expected to grow significantly in 2023 and beyond.
Hospitals play one of the most important roles in any community, alongside other vital first responders such as law enforcement and fire protection. Medical providers are given one of the greatest responsibilities: to treat and heal the sick.
On behalf of the locum tenens industry Locumpedia expresses deep appreciation 6.3 million times over to the healthcare pros who partner with the locum tenens staffing firms we serve. We hope you feel as valued this week as you truly are by all of us.
