Nurse Strikes are Scary, but License Verification Doesn’t Have to be

More than 7,000 nurses from Mount Sinai's main campus in East Harlem and Montefiore in the Bronx walked off the job in early January. The three day strike ended with an agreement of a 19% wage increase, benefits that match or exceed those of peer institutions, and more than 170 new nursing positions. (cbsnews.com)

Nurse strikes like these are expected to be on the rise for a variety of reasons. In a survey released by betternurse.org in April of 2022, it was found that:

• Over 69% of nurses who responded said staffing is slightly worse or much worse than in past years.
• Almost 65% of nurses said hospitals are using too much overtime to staff units.
• 48% of respondents from the survey reported rising levels of workplace violence.

While we can’t stop these strikes from happening, we can definitely be better prepared for these events. During the Mount Sinai strike, hundreds of traveling nurses were brought in to fill positions, meaning hundreds of licenses needed to be verified and verified quickly. If you find yourself in this position, a manual verification process is going to slow you down and pose threats to patient care.

Validating Traveling Nurses

While it is a standard practice among nursing unions to give management 10 days’ notice before a strike, that’s really not a lot of time for HR and Compliance teams to verify licenses for hundreds of traveling nurses. Manual primary source verification is not only more time-consuming, it’s also more error-prone. While strikes are scary, license verification doesn’t have to be, not with Workforce Validate.

About Workforce Validate

Workforce Validate helps HR teams, compliance teams, and all healthcare administrators automate what can be a very manual process - license and certification verification and exclusion monitoring. Workforce Validate can track licenses, flag odd results that you might miss, and perform exclusion checks against state sanctions, state and federal exclusions, and OIG/SAM.

From initial onboarding to ongoing monitoring, Workforce Validate ensures each member of your staff is clear to be on the floor, so that HR teams can:

• Have confidence in the compliance status of their entire workforce
• Eliminate manual processes, maximizing HR employees’ time
• Know with clarity which providers can be scheduled to be on the floor
• Ensure patient safety
• Gather compliance statuses on new hires and referring providers
• Avoid penalties

With access to over 900 board sanction sites, more than 70 federal and state exclusion lists (including OIG and SAM), and over one million healthcare professionals validated to date, you can be sure Workforce Validate has the information you need for the license verification process to get travel nurses on the floor, fast.

Why?

Because the solution offers:

• Expiration reminder emails sent to providers with expiring licenses
• Daily checks of licenses expiring in 7 days
• Error alerts to review non-compliant provider records
• Easy reporting capabilities
• Expedited implementation and full client support

Workforce Validate is easy to install and even easier to use. Visit our website for helpful videos on how to get started. From there, get in touch with us, we’d love to walk you through a demo of the solution. Rest assured we’re here to help you navigate today's and tomorrow’s nursing shortage.