As concerns mount about the growing shortage of healthcare workers across the globe,¹ healthcare organizations are looking for ways to train and recruit the next generation of clinical professionals. Guthrie White, Chief Executive Officer at QuantumIT, said that a major choke point in increasing the number of clinical professionals entering the field is the difficulty of organizing the hands-on work experience required for their qualification.

“All health professionals need real-world clinical experience – and that time may even be government mandated. For example, a nurse may need 120 hours of maternity experience or work in surgery to finish their training. Those hours need to be tracked and monitored,” he explained. “And it can be an arduous administrative task for both the university and the healthcare organization where they attend for clinical placement.”

The demand for more clinical placements is not only a vital part of healthcare education for tomorrow’s physicians, nurses and clinical professionals, but is also a way for hospitals, health systems and other provider organizations to identify future employees who align with their organizational mission and culture. Technology solutions enabling educational institutions and healthcare organizations to manage the clinical placement process more efficiently are the missing components needed to meet the escalating need for more placements.

QuantumIT recently partnered with Ramsay Health Care, the largest private healthcare network in Australia, to help enhance high-quality clinical placement experiences across its facilities and bridge this technological gap. With the deployment of QuantumIT’s InPlace Network cloud solution, Ramsay Health Care has been able to implement an end-to-end management model for clinical placements that significantly reduces the work effort and increases management visibility and risk controls. This solution allows the healthcare network to better address the operational challenges involved with practical healthcare training and education – and to ensure that all associated data, from clinical hours to immunization status, is accurate and up to date.

“Clinical placement is a substantial administrative task. It’s a big job for the universities to find placements. They may interact with many thousands of healthcare providers to find them. It’s also a big job for the healthcare hosts. They need to keep track of prerequisites, immunizations, background checks and type of hours,” said White. “InPlace Network handles that and all interactions with education partners through a single portal, giving both the universities and the healthcare organizations the information they need to manage it all.”

“To manage a program of this scale, we need the best technology available,” said Shae Sandri, National Student Placement Lead at Ramsay Health Care. “InPlace Network is enabling us to streamline our existing processes and ensure our facilitators can focus on supporting the students on placement at Ramsay.”

 “It’s also helped Ramsay Health Care identify potential future recruits – the people they’d like to hire once their education is completed,” White added.

White said that the successful partnership between Ramsay Health Care and QuantumIT is helping to shape the healthcare professionals of the future. With the right technologies in place, both universities and health networks can benefit, he pointed out. Ramsay Health Care sees the clinical placement program not only as a critical element of supporting the growth of the healthcare workforce generally, but also as essential to their graduate recruitment program.

Karthik Rajaraman, Program Manager at Ramsay Health Care, agreed. “The expertise and collaborative working approach brought by QuantumIT has been a revelation to us and a great complement to the Ramsay team’s focus and capability,” he said. “We’re excited about this partnership’s potential and the remarkable impact it will have on shaping the healthcare professionals of the future.”

Reference

1. World Health Organization. Health workforce. https://www.who.int/health-topics/health-workforce.