Healthcare is unlike most other industries in that demand never ceases. Hospitals and clinics are nearly always running at full capacity, so when their medical radiographers are sick, go on vacation, or start their maternity leave, the pressure on the remaining team can be unbearable. If you work in HR, how can you find skilled and experienced replacements, sometimes at short notice?

Many facilities have heard about the benefits of hiring a locum to cover radiology staffing shortages but aren’t sure about their options. This is where a radiology staffing agency like ProMed HR Solutions can help. If your team is overworked and stressed, or if you are paying too much in overtime, hiring locum practitioners can be a brilliant solution to these problems. In this blog, we’ll highlight 10 benefits of hiring a locum for your clinic or radiology department.

1. Cover Gaps in Staffing

When permanent staff is unavailable, locum tenens providers offer continuity of care. They give your team more resilience during sick leave, vacations, or family emergencies. When you work with ProMed HR Solutions, you can rest assured that everyone you bring in has been carefully screened not only for their clinical experience and skill but also for their fit within your hospital or clinic. We take the time to develop a relationship with your organization and make sure you know who to contact as soon as you have a planned or unexpected need.

2. Cover Increased Workload or Extended Hours

When the pandemic was at its height, many radiology departments and imaging centres postponed nonurgent imaging exams for months. Now several of these imaging facilities are dealing with a backlog. When you consider that these techs must take additional time to clean and sterilize the equipment between each patient, it’s easy to see how your current team can quickly get overwhelmed.

One of the biggest benefits of hiring a locum is that you have the temporary support you need to cover this increased workload, provide relief to overworked staff, and even extend your hours to ensure that imaging services don’t fall significantly behind schedule. If you need support with your radiology staffing needs, ProMed HR Solutions can provide a workforce solution that gets you back on track.

3. Save Money on Overtime

Locums can actually help you to save money by cutting down on the overtime you need to pay your in-house imaging technologists. This simple but often overlooked fact can save your facility a lot of money, especially during times of greater patient demand.

4. Better Work-Life Balance for Your Staff

We’ve all heard about the ‘Great Resignation’: workers in all industries, including healthcare, are leaving demanding jobs to seek a better work-life balance. Using locum technologists can give your teams the healthier lifestyle they want without risking a large workforce reduction or loss of your highest-performing employees. 

At ProMed HR Solutions, we can ensure that you have coverage for anything from a two-week vacation to an extended maternity leave. Our qualified and experienced imaging specialists are ready to support your team upon arrival, allowing facility operations to carry on smoothly.

5. Prevent Staff Burnout

According to this 2020 study, healthcare workers regularly reported feeling burned out, which impacted their job satisfaction and relationships with their families. In fact, many respondents stated that their workload negatively impacted their mental health, and some even considered suicide due to the stress of their job.

Incorporating locum technologists in your radiology clinic or department can manage the demands on your workforce by allowing employees to take time off when they need to without impacting patient care. You can prevent burnout and ensure that everyone is healthy and engaged while on shift.

6. Prevent Human Error

There is a recognized correlation between working long hours and increased risk of medical error. To provide quality care and prevent dangerous mistakes, proper staffing and reasonable hours are essential. A locum radiographer helps to protect your facility- and your patients – from medical and diagnostic errors by ensuring that your regular staff aren’t constantly working overtime and can take a day or two off when they need to.

7. ‘Test-Drive’ a New Technologist

Hiring new team members is always a gamble. A technologist with stellar credentials may not turn out to be a good fit for your company culture, and even a candidate who starts off on the right foot could end up not being the best choice for the position. When that happens, you have to go through the unpleasant task of terminating their employment and resuming interviews.

By bringing in a locum to fill the vacancy on your staff, there’s less pressure to hire quickly, and if the new hire doesn’t work out, their workload won’t have to be allocated among the rest of the team. If the locum does excellent work, you can either extend their contract or speak to their radiology staffing agency about hiring them.

8. Fill in for Retiring Staff

If one of your senior radiologists is retiring and your other technologists don’t have the bandwidth to add more patients to their already-high workload, you can bring in a locum to cover the gap while you start interviewing replacements.

The locum technologist can make it possible for the other employees to maintain their current patient load, so that your clinic doesn’t lose revenue or have to turn away patients. Since many locum contracts can be renewed or extended, you can take the time you need to find the right replacement for retiring team members.

9. Quality Candidates Assured

When you have short-term staffing needs, it can be hard to find a medical imaging professional with the relevant experience. Like other medical technologists, x-ray techs are in high demand, so how can you attract a quality candidate to cover extended hours or staff vacations?

By working with a radiology staffing agency, you can rest assured that all candidates have been carefully screened beforehand. ProMed HR Solutions reviews every professional’s resume to identify their competencies and ensure that they are compatible with your needs. We also-

• Interview them
• Conduct a criminal record check
• Confirm their availability 

We maintain an extensive database of certified healthcare specialists, each with a minimum of two years’ experience, so you can rest assured that the technologist we recommend will meet and probably exceed your expectations.

10. Improve Team and Patient Satisfaction

By retaining locums, clinics and hospitals ensure continuity of care for patients and a balanced workload for their clinical staff. ProMed HR Solutions vets all digital imaging technologists ahead of time to ensure that the locum you engage will be a good fit. We understand the value that you place on team culture and make sure that the professionals we send will make a positive impact on team satisfaction as well as the quality of patient services.

Do You Have Questions About Hiring Locums?

If you do, pick up the phone and call ProMed HR Solutions at 1-833-776-6336. You can also contact us online. 

For years, we have been providing hospitals, clinics, and other healthcare organizations with skilled, competent, and vetted medical imaging technologists in modalities like the following:

• Ultrasound and Echo
• MRI
• CT
• X-ray
• Nuclear Medicine
• CLXT (Combined Lab and X-ray) 

As a national leader in healthcare staffing and workforce solutions, we are dedicated to quality results and client satisfaction. This commitment has earned us the trust of healthcare facilities and government agencies across North America, and we look forward to delivering similar personnel solutions for you.

Radiation Therapists play a critical role at your facility. By using ionizing radiation to treat diseases like cancer, they are an important part of your critical healthcare team, which is why it’s a challenge when they go on vacation or take a planned leave. With many patients waiting weeks or even months for radiation therapy, delaying treatments until the therapist returns hardly seem like an option.

Fortunately, it doesn’t have to be. In this article, we’ll review the ways that a traveling Radiation Therapist can support your facility and how a radiation therapy staffing agency can help.

What is a Traveling Radiation Therapist?

Traveling Radiation Therapists work on a locum tenens basis, meaning that they temporarily fill in for employees who are out of the office. They perform the same tasks as regular Radiation Therapists, such as operating IMRT linear accelerators and other machines that use radiation to combat cancer. Although employed on a contract basis, traveling Radiation Therapists play a vital role in helping cancer patients fight their devastating disease.

Benefits of Using a Traveling Radiation Therapist

Below is an overview of the many benefits that a locum (traveling) Radiation Therapist can bring to your hospital or clinic. 

1. Avoid Disrupting Treatment Delivery Schedules

Smaller health facilities in particular often struggle to meet the needs of their local populations. If one of your Radiation Therapists takes parental leave for months, it can delay life-saving treatments and create a backlog that leaves staff and patients scrambling and stressed. Many locations are still dealing with higher patient loads due to the pandemic, so it doesn’t take much to impact schedules.

A traveling Radiation Therapist can help you better serve your patients by ensuring that treatments proceed as scheduled. As Radiation centres are mostly in larger areas, patients living in rural communities need to schedule their travel to the facility for treatment.  This can be very expensive, time consuming and stressful on top of the health issues the patient is already facing.  

A locum Radiation Therapist can minimize the need to reschedule patients and keep radiation therapy services going until you have a better idea whether you should hire someone full-time.   

2. Save Money

Traveling Radiation Therapists are excellent options for hospitals and clinics in need of temporary coverage. They can cover shifts without you having to commit to hiring a full-time employee, which is often prohibitively expensive and takes time to implement. 

When your facility needs reliable yet temporary staffing solutions, locum professionals can step in until your regular employees return. Since they have at least a few years of experience, they can join the team as soon as they arrive and keep treatment schedules on time.

3. Prevent Staff Burnout

Medical professionals like Radiation Therapists work extremely hard and often under stressful circumstances. When one of them goes on vacation, becomes ill, or takes parental leave, it can increase the burden carried by other team members. In 24-7 operations like hospitals, remaining staff can risk burnout. 

A traveling Radiation Therapist makes it easier for your staff to maintain a better work-life balance. When their shift ends they want to (and should be able to) go home and decompress, not fill in for a colleague who’s going to be away for weeks or even months. Working long hours without respite can also lead to dangerous mistakes: fatigue can result in serious injuries to patients and staff. Keep your staff and patients safer by ensuring skilled temporary coverage when needed.

4. Meet Patient Demand

A traveling Radiation Therapist fills gaps in rotations that would otherwise leave healthcare facilities short-staffed and unable to meet patient needs. In addition, when surges in demand for services like radiation therapy occur, you can hire a locum to help deliver treatments without forcing patients to wait for their critical procedures.. Since travel Radiation Therapists tend to have years of experience behind them, they can go straight to work without needing extensive training or orientation first. 

5. Increase Revenue

When patients need services that your facility doesn’t offer, they have to go elsewhere to get the specialized care they need. For example, you may have Radiation Therapists who are experienced in treating adults but have less practical experience with children, so parents with sick children may need  to travel dozens or even hundreds of miles to receive the care they need.

When this happens, not only do you lose out on potential revenue, but these patients may have to leave the community for a long period of time because they can’t access treatment closer to friends and family. When you hire a traveling Radiation Therapist to provide cancer treatment services when needed, your facility benefits from the revenue and the patient doesn’t have to travel far from home. 

How Do You Find a Traveling Radiation Therapist?

Radiation therapists with the relevant experience can be hard to find when short-term staffing needs arise. With experienced healthcare professionals in such high demand, how can you find the right one to cover extended hours, surges in demand, or staff absences?

With a radiation therapy staffing agency, you have access to pre-screened candidates who can hit the ground running when they arrive. At ProMed HR Solutions, we have a detailed screening process that includes detailed interviews, a criminal background check, and confirmation of availability. With our extensive database of certified healthcare specialists, each with at least two years’ experience, you can be confident that we can match you with a Radiation Therapist who will support your team with competency and professionalism. 

Need a Traveling Radiation Therapist? Our Radiation Therapy Staffing Agency Can Help!

When you’re in urgent need of a skilled and experienced Radiation Therapist, ProMed HR Solutions can help. We serve the temporary healthcare staffing needs of medical facilities across Canada through our nationwide database of pre-vetted professionals that include Radiation Therapists.

By matching the skills, experience, and desires of our candidates with clients whose needs are parallel, we create a seamless experience for both parties, resulting in better patient outcomes. Radiation oncology departments and radiation cancer treatment centres in particular require unique and specialized services that we’re happy to provide. To learn more about how we can support your facility, visit www.promedhr.ca or call (833) 776-6336. 

Recent insights from the Canadian Association of Radiologists (CAR), the Canadian Association of Medical Radiation Technologists (CAMRT), and Sonography Canada, are highlighting the increasingly desperate situation unfolding concerning Canadian patients’ lack of reliable access to medical imaging and subsequent treatment.

Particularly since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, medical facilities across the country are experiencing significant pressure on their already-limited resources.

The report, entitled “Improving Access to Lifesaving Imagining Care for Canadians,” claims the only way forward is a multistakeholder approach to ensure sustainable access to lifesaving medical imaging services, focusing primarily on how increased investment is vital in the following areas:

• Installing up-to-date medical imaging equipment
• Implementing a medical imaging health human resources strategy
• Integrating technology and leveraging new advances in information technology, including artificial intelligence

Post-pandemic patient influx

The COVID-19 pandemic, paired with pre-existing healthcare crises, has created an inherent need for healthcare systems and workers to present a united front.

Due to a shift in focus and priority, the pandemic impeded thousands of Canadians’ access to a wide range of medical services, including surgery, therapies, diagnostic treatments and prompt medical imaging services.

Access to medical imaging was already a challenge pre-pandemic, resulting in excessive wait times, but the backlog incurred by the pandemic has significantly worsened these conditions.

According to the report, pre-pandemic, Canadians were waiting an average of 50 to 82 days for CT scans and up to 89 days for MRIs. However, during the pandemic, these waitlists spanned even longer, creating incredibly troubling scenarios for those requiring screening for life-threatening conditions, such as cancer.

The pandemic has prompted a domino effect where a high concentration of people are experiencing delayed diagnostic imaging and treatments, compounded by an ever-ageing population, resulting in prolonged delays for existing patients and a massive inundation of new patients.

These conditions are further exacerbated by a high number of patients requiring urgent treatment due to delayed diagnoses and worsening conditions. This influx places extreme pressure on radiology and medical imaging departments.

Investing in healthcare in more ways than one

While upgrading equipment is top of mind, additional resources are crucial in bolstering the joint unit response, namely, appropriate staffing of the respective departments and imaging units with qualified sonographers, and medical radiation technologists (MRTs).

Current numbers do not come close to meeting the growing patient need, and those currently occupying these positions are overworked and burnt out, which was already an issue before the pandemic, but has since reached dire levels.

In fact, according to a 2021 survey, there was an 80% jump in MRTs reporting signs of burnout.

Currently, there are simply not enough workers in the industry to support the increased number of patients requiring care, but the strategy to best meet these needs starts with providing healthcare teams with adequate human resources to ensure staff are properly supported.

Harnessing technology

Investment in medical imaging equipment in Canada is currently at a 20-year low. According to research from the Conference Board of Canada, 35% of medical imaging equipment is 10 or more years old.

This figure directly infringes on the “Golden Rules” instituted by the European Coordination Committee of the Radiological, Electromedical and Healthcare IT Industry (COCIR), which specifies that 30% of equipment should be no less than five years old and no more than 10% of equipment should be 10 years or older.

Operating outdated equipment not only has the potential of producing inaccurate results but is unreliable, requiring more frequent maintenance.

Putting patients first

While many may believe we are on the tail-end of the COVID-19 pandemic, the healthcare system will be dealing with the aftermath for years to come.

As previously stated, the pandemic caused rampant delays for countless patients requiring medical imaging and screenings for diseases such as cancer, with many told their initial or follow-up imaging appointments were considered “non-urgent.” 

In fact, a recent study published by the Canadian Partnership Against Cancer predicts there will be over 20,000 additional cancer-related deaths in the next 10 years but that this number could be reduced by nearly 80% if cancer care, including essential diagnostic imaging services, were increased by 10% above pre-pandemic levels.. 

Due to backlogs and increased wait times, patients are understandably anxious about their access to potentially life-saving diagnostic imaging, prompting the Canadian Cancer Survivor Network to place increased pressure on governments, healthcare facilities, and cancer centres to invest in stronger cancer care services.

A way forward creates new opportunities

Rectifying the many problems experienced before, and exacerbated by, the pandemic will require a multifaceted approach, with one of the fundamental rules being that we must support radiologists and other medical imaging professionals, beginning with providing them with adequate human resources.

There are also not enough healthcare workers currently in the industry to support the significant influx of patients requiring care. According to a report commissioned by the Canadian Medical Association, job vacancies among healthcare practitioners increased by 92% between September and December 2021 alone compared to the same time period before the pandemic.

That said, healthcare staffing is more than just having the right amount of professionals to meet this influx. It’s also about having access to the people that healthcare facilities want to staff; dedicated, hardworking, experienced professionals.

Our team at ProMed HR Solutions understands these challenges from both employer and employee perspectives, placing us in the ideal position to not only find top talent, but guide them to positions that are right for them.

We specialize in medical staffing solutions to locate and place the best, most qualified, compassionate care providers in a wide assortment of specialized disciplines, including medical imaging, such as:

• MRI technologists
• Nuclear medicine technologists
• X-ray technologists
• Ultrasound technologists
• CT technologists

Our objective is to provide meaningful opportunities for dedicated medical imaging professionals to position them in a locum position that best suits their skills and goals.

To access the full report, please click here. If you are looking to hire locum specialists or join our locum team at ProMed HR Solutions, visit our website at www.promedhr.ca or call (833) 776-6336.