In an on-demand healthcare environment, staff balance friendly customer service, speed, and quality care. Your employees are the heart of your clinic, and make the difference between an average patient experience—and a great one.
From proper hiring to thorough training, managing all roles requires time investment by owners and management. Each staff member fills a meaningful role, and in urgent care, often several roles. Here are a few tips from insider training experts who’ve seen what works in educating urgent care personnel.
If training is going to succeed, someone needs to be in charge of it. Assign someone to head up training. And create an outlined training program. For new urgent cares, your checklist will include human resource needs, HIPAA and OSHA regulations, and technology and facility logistics. Start-up urgent cares should set out guidelines on how to address and greet patients, workflows based on scenarios, and policies to ensure consistent patient treatment.
Existing clinics should focus on an orientation plan (tip 4). Make training a priority by dedicating time and effort—along with resources of people and a plan. While an upfront cost, standardized training pays dividends in the daily running of the clinic. It also helps with the smoothness and safety of the patient experience, and makes a more satisfying work environment for employees.
Training should be broken out by role, so each staff member can focus on their daily tasks. This should include both physical workflow steps, and also any other assigned duties—such as EMR entry, relaying of information, and lab or triage requirements.
Use fake patient scenarios to train employees, especially if you’re a start-up clinic. While the urgency of real life cannot be duplicated, the repetition of facing various scenarios can help prepare staff on how to handle real patients when the clinic doors open. Hands-on practice with staff playing the role of fake patients, along with a paired, experienced mentor, can vastly improve new employee training as well.
Cross-training roles is also valuable. You don’t need to fully cross-train employees unless they will actually be doing other duties, but a general knowledge of what all the other roles in the clinic do will help each role know the cause and effect of their actions. Cross-training, especially for new employees, can help give them a bird’s eye view of daily operations.
Pitfalls with training can start in the hiring process. Urgent cares need to hire deliberately for every role. A common mistake is focusing hiring efforts on nurses and providers, while giving less thought and consideration to front desk and billing staff. While good clinicians are vitally needed, so are front desk personnel and billers, especially if your clinic cares about revenue.
In urgent care, customer service is as important as treatment—so hiring qualified, insurance-knowledgeable front desk staff will help improve the entire patient and billing process. Don’t think of front desk personnel as simply data entry people. They are the first impression of your clinic and are a big part of the health of your reimbursement.
Many urgent cares hire clinicians who’ve been in emergency care or family practice settings. Urgent care is uniquely different from both, being less stressful than the ER, but faster pace than a doctor’s office. Urgent care also often requires individuals to fill multiple roles, creating task diversity. Having clinicians with excellent “bedside manners” that can handle varying situations comfortably is ideal for the urgent care environment.
After your clinic is open, it’s important to create an orientation program for onboarding new staff. Orientation ensures that all staff hold up the standard of care you expect in your clinic. Implement orientation in a way that makes the most sense for your new staff members. You can do group classes for new hires or onboard each new hire individually—depending on your hiring practices.
Orientation should begin before the staff member even starts working. Get new employees familiar with policies and workflow before they start. Assign education needs (logistics, software, etc.) for your clinic, along with human resource requirements, to begin the learning process right away.
Checklists for workflow steps help new staff get acclimated. Add a mentor to shadow new staff to ensure accurate practicing and to improve retention—then let staff practice on their own. Have a time frame to test new employees’ comprehension of standards, and offer positive reinforcement for efforts.
To ensure a solid foundation of knowledge in your staff, it’s important to appoint “champion” teachers in your urgent care. These champions are the go-to experts that new employees can rely on to know the answers to questions—whether those questions are about workflow, procedures and policies, or software and equipment knowledge.
Role champions are on the front lines of your daily clinic operations. Use these champions to share clinical updates and support consistent practices. Champions are more efficient than having all staff depend on one or two clinic managers for knowledge—and are more practical for support than just referring to training manuals.
Be thoughtful when selecting champions for your clinic. They don’t necessarily have to be the smartest or most tenured employees, but they should have an attitude of “go-getterness” and be willing and able to teach others.
Here’s a list of personality traits that we recommend for your role champions:
At the clinic at least six months
True, it’s difficult to teach to every individual learning style. Staff are simply too varied to teach skills exactly the way they’d like, but you can try to group learning styles together. Traditionally, billers and front desk personnel like to be demonstrated to first—and then like to practice on their own. Clinicians prefer hands-on learning, and being able to learn on the fly.
Keep in mind everyone learns differently—and adapting teaching, even slightly, may help others pick up information just a little bit better. You never know what makes teaching “click” for others. Sometimes it’s sharing in a class format, or it could be when two peers explain something to each other. Try to offer a variety of ways for staff to lea. Videos, shadowing, demonstrations, manuals, and one-on-one support are all options. Encourage questions and create a supportive environment for learning and teamwork.
Urgent cares frequently hire part-timers, floating personnel, and moonlighters who may work at several other jobs. Because of intermittent staff, it can be difficult to relay changes after orientation. It can also be hard to keep up with changes when staff may work at three or four healthcare organizations. While changes can be communicated through email, and staff can catch others doing steps the “old way”, the best way to ensure consistency is with regular workflow audits.
Another good practice when making workflow changes is to clarify the reasoning behind the change. Relate the update to the previous way it was practiced, and what it will look like in the future. This “entire picture” scenario will help staff be less resistant to changes, and help them understand why updates are beneficial.
After staff are hired and trained, they need to be trusted. You interviewed, vetted, did background checks, and ultimately hired them for a reason. After a set orientation and training period, they need to be able to grow. If wise decisions are made in hiring and training, then the probability is your employees will be strong staff—and uphold your standards.
Not empowering staff to make healthcare decisions is prohibitive—to not only them, but also the patient’s well-being. If only leadership is allowed to make important calls, staff will get frustrated. And in urgent care, that leader might not always be in clinic to make that decision. Clarify what choices staff can make, and which should be approved by a manager.
Training urgent care staff is vital to ensuring the excellence of your clinic’s care. Standard practices and a clear training program ensure that your quality of care will always be high—no matter how many staff you hire or may change over time. Current employees’ knowledge bases are essential for teaching new employees, so harness this power—along with any planned teaching efforts.
Remember, deliberate hiring for every role is the most important step to training success. The old adage of hire for personality and train skills is as true in urgent care as it is with any other business. Add training to enhance those individuals you’ve selected, and you’ll have a staff who makes your urgent care stand out from the competition. Patients will notice the difference in treatment and choose your urgent care over the rest.
You can learn more about solving staffing challenges in these resources:
eBook 6 Urgent Care Staffing Strategies to Protect Your Bottom Line
Webinar The Top Behaviors of a Winning Urgent Care Team
Webinar How to Operate Your Urgent Care in an Understaffed Environment
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