The Ongoing Nursing Shortage and Nurses’ Mental Health (Interview)

On Friday December 11, 2020, Incredible Health CEO, Iman Abuzeid, spoke with Carol Massar of Bloomberg Businessweek Radio to discuss the ongoing nursing shortage crisis, and how the COVID-19 pandemic is affected the mental health of nurses nationwide.

To learn more, listen to the interview or check out the transcript below.

Interview transcript

Carol Massar (Host, Bloomberg Businessweek):
I do want to get back to the virus and what members of our healthcare community are seeing to deal with it and how they are also taking care of their own members. Great to have back with us, Dr. Iman Abuzeid. She is CEO and co-founder at Incredible Health. And just a reminder, her company connects hospitals with nurses and other healthcare workers. So they have been on the front lines from day one of this health pandemic. She joins us once again on the phone in San Francisco. Dr. Abuzeid, nice to have you back with us. How are you doing?

Iman Abuzeid (CEO, Incredible Health):
Thank you so much for having me. I’m “pandemic good”.

Carol:
You’re “pandemic good,” I know. Well, but San Francisco has been in lock down for a while here still.

Iman:
It has. Yes.

Carol:
Yes. Well, tell us about your teams and what you’re seeing right now in terms of COVID cases and how they’re dealing with it, because it’s one thing to have to go through this once, but now that we’re dealing with second and, multiple waves here, it becomes really difficult for everyone involved.

Iman:
Yes. So, we have a rapidly growing career marketplace for healthcare workers and what that means is, the hospitals that are using our platform to hire permanent nurses, as well as the nurses that are using the hiring platform, as well as our many additional services, they’re in the eye of the storm, right? They’re in the middle of the COVID pandemic and they are certainly on the front lines of it.

And what we’re seeing actually, it’s actually evolved since March and April. So, in terms of hospital leadership and hospital executives, they seem to have gotten more of a handle actually on how to cope and manage through COVID. You know, a lot of them have resolved the personal protective equipment shortages. A lot of them have infection control protocols in place, and are trying to do whatever they can to support their employees. And then on the nurse side, just the burnout and the stress is really starting to set in now.

As you know, nursing is a profession that has an intense amount of burnout and work even before the pandemic and the pandemic has just really exacerbated that. So we are seeing quite a bit of fatigue out there.

Carol:
So how are you dealing with that specifically? Because I do wonder is that fatigue leading to workers who cannot work, or is it with some support that they are able to continue? I mean, there is a point where I’m sure that you guys look at your teams and say, you know what? You got to take a break, you just have to.

Iman:
Yes, absolutely. There was a very interesting study done by the team at New York Presbyterian. This is a published study that was done in April 2020, when New York was going through its big peaks. And it showed that nurses were expressing some of the highest levels of stress. 64% of them were reporting symptoms of acute stress, which ranges from nightmares to inability to stop thinking about the virus. So this is pretty challenging mentally, to cope with COVID and, you know, the impact that’s having is – certainly burnout and stress.

And then also, the retention rates are dropping in some hospitals. In other words, hospitals are losing nurses, just simply from burnout, which is making the staffing shortages even more challenging. So, it’s a pretty tough time right now.

Carol:
Well, and I think that was one of the concerns, right? That as we start to see numbers increase, that there were concerns about, first and foremost, healthcare workers getting sick, and once again, exposed to the virus, and then there’s this burnout concern, and then ultimately concerns that there wouldn’t be enough people to take care of those that were in hospitals. I mean, are we seeing anything approach that level or not yet?

Iman:
We are. Even before the pandemic, the U.S. was already in a nursing shortage and a healthcare worker shortage, because our demand for healthcare as a country keeps going up, our population is aging, and we just simply don’t have enough workers in the system. Now, the pandemic certainly added stress to that system in terms of shortages. And in the early days of the pandemic, when COVID was, for example, only focused on the Northeast, there was an ability to move staff around and, you know, there was some flexibility there. But now, December 2020, where COVID is impacting almost every single state in the country, it’s seeing community spread, you don’t have that option of moving nurses around the country anymore. And nearly everyone we are working with has reported pretty significant staff shortages.

Carol:
You know, it’s interesting, I think we’ve talked about it before and we certainly have had on a fair amount of guests and other CEOs who just talk about workers in general have seen, I think it was one of the unexpected outcomes of the pandemic, right? We understood the health impact, but also the mental impact and the importance of our mental well-being. I feel like it has just escalated in terms of conversations and actions and understanding that we need to make sure that this is a priority really in our entire society. But, I am curious about what you guys have done to support the healthcare workers and nurses in your community.

Iman:
Yes, so, our mission at Incredible Health is to help healthcare professionals live better lives and help them find and do their best work. And, Incredible Health is not just the place where they find a permanent job in 20 days or less, but it’s also the place where they manage their career and are able to interact with their peers.

So what we built and just announced earlier this week is the Incredible Health Nurse Community. And what that is, is a free online community, built exclusively for nurses, and it’s a safe place where they can support each other and give each other advice. And that’s on many topics, everything from transitioning between specialties, dealing with workplace stress and even fun topics like what are your favorite scrub brands. The unique thing about it is that they can even post anonymously too. And it’s just a place for them to really, give each other advice and support. And there is no safe place for them to do that online today. And so we wanted to create that.

Carol:
So almost like a blog or a place to go, as you said, to talk about some really serious issues, but also just talk about, you know, just ways of kind of getting by and doing your job in this kind of environment.

Iman:
Exactly. It’s a social network. And then the other thing that we added is, a digital journaling, feature. So studies show that when nurses do written reflection at the end of their day, it can have a positive impact on their ability to handle stress, burnout, trauma, fatigue. And so we were like, “okay, let’s, digitize this.”

So, they can use the Incredible Health iOS, Android, or web app, and basically document and take an inventory of their emotions in these structured daily prompts. And that’s just to help them, you know, process stress more effectively. Both of those features are 100% free. They’re available to every single nurse in the country and available in our apps and on our website too.

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Carol:
How much activity are you already seeing on both of them?

Iman:
Quite a lot, actually. I mean, I think there’s been thousands of nurses that have used the Incredible Health Nurse Community, the social network. It has been live for many months, and it was only just publicly announced a few days ago.

Carol:
What do you think in terms of some of the longer term trends or realizations or thinkings about the healthcare sector? What stays with us, do you think, post pandemic?

Iman:
Healthcare workers pre-pandemic were overworked, under appreciated. I don’t think the overworking is going away anytime soon, but I would hope the appreciation for them does increase. There’s been a lot of visibility on them during the pandemic and I hope we just don’t forget that this is a group of workers that are critical to our economy and critical to our country, and we should be doing whatever we can to give them as much appreciation and support as possible.

Carol:
What do you think about, whether there’s procedures, processes that make it easier so that healthcare workers can just focus on, you know, caring for patients and others? And I just wonder what are the things we’re learning about that? And we’ve talked about, I think telemedicine and telehealth. I do feel like that’s here to stay.

Iman:
Yes. A hundred percent. We’ve seen a few specific examples in our area – during the pandemic we launched this pandemic hiring suite and every hospital is now embracing remote interviewing. And remote onboarding, and automatically scheduling interviews. And that has accelerated the hiring process on our platform from an average of 25 days before the pandemic to just 12 days today. I don’t see that going back to what it was, you know, I think they have embraced these new workflows that are driven by technology in order to operate more efficiently.

Carol:
Yes. As everybody says, you know, once you start doing something for several months in a row, it’s a habit that’s going to be hard. And this is too for consumer trends. These habits, aren’t just going to go away.

Hey, you guys have been growing amid all of this and you’ve entered into some new markets or health systems, I think in Florida, Maryland, Colorado, Nevada. So you’ve been, amid all of this, expanding the business. Tell us a little bit about that.

Iman:
Yes we have been. Our home state is California, and then we’ve expanded in Texas and Florida and just announced a few days ago launching in Louisiana, Maryland, Iowa, Colorado, and Nevada. Very excited about our geographic expansion because we want to bring the Incredible Health vision and the career platform, and enable hospitals and health systems to hire permanent nurses as rapidly as they can. And, we wanted to make sure that we had a whole variety of states that we expand in. This is not just a platform that’s for the coasts. We want to include the middle of the country as well. We want to include the South, and our geographic expansion will continue over the next 12 months.

Carol:
Well, and it’s interesting. Is the expansion as a result of what’s going on in the pandemic and you just kind of stepped up some of your expansion plans? I’m just curious how that impacted it.

Iman:
So we had raised our series A, over $17 million of capital, in 2019. So expansion plans were always in the works and yes, the pandemic has accelerated it, just because the shortage just keeps getting worse and more intense.

Carol:
I do wonder too, you know, you talk about the shortage, (just got about a minute left here), what do we do to address this? Because, we’re all going to need more healthcare workers going forward, especially as we have an older population, aging population, people are living longer.

Iman:
Yes. So we certainly need to educate more healthcare workers. Whatever it takes to make it as cheap as possible to become educated and trained as a healthcare worker is going to be critical. That’s one of the reasons we offer free continuing education to every single nurse in the country. And, you know, the training needs to increase too. So even after nursing school is done, there needs to be an expansion of the training programs for nurses.

Carol:
Yes, it’s simple, but it’s sometimes hard to get it all going, and just get more people into the pipeline here. Iman, thank you so much, Dr. Iman Abuzeid, she’s co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Incredible Health joining us on the phone from San Francisco, and really just talking about some of the strains and stresses that are certainly on our healthcare community and nursing community.

And as she said, during March and April and the spring time that with the pandemic so centered on the East coast, you know, healthcare professionals were able to kind of move around the country and go where those strained healthcare systems were to help out. But now you’re seeing virus cases around the country. It’s much more difficult. And that is really putting a strain on the availability of the necessary healthcare workers needed to really address the specific and current virus situation. All right. You’re listening, to Bloomberg.

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