CHARLESTON, W.Va. –Cabinet Secretary for the WV Department of Health Facilities Michael Caruso says that they continue to struggle with staffing at their seven facilities, especially for psychiatry service facilities and will continue to struggle if something isn’t done.
The department oversees seven hospitals in the state, Hopemont Hospital, Jackie Withrow Hospital, John Manchin’s Sr. Healthcare Center, Lakin Hospital, Mildred Mitchell-Bateman Hospital, Welch Community Hospital, and William R. Sharpe Jr. Hospital.
Caruso says that their biggest problem is keeping clinical contract staffing at Sharpe Hospital, which is located in Weston, where 95% of the nursing staff is out-of-state.
He says this is why the budget between FY 2024 and FY 2025 went up.
“It is a very very expensive venture for the state of West Virginia and that was basically the increases, we had previous invoices we had to pay, we had invoices that we needed to continue to pay,” Caruso said in front of the House Finance Committee on Friday. “But we tried to get a jump on that, and we haven’t completely beat that little element up at Sharpe, that’s a big focus area for us in the future.”
He said it’s especially hard to get people to want to work in the psychiatry service facilities because of the environment that surrounds it, especially at Sharpe.
“Who wants to come in and work, you get beat up, criminals live in the facilities, it’s not a very good area, it’s not a good environment,” Caruso said.
He said the location also plays a factor in not having enough pool to choose from when it comes to staffing at Sharpe, because Weston doesn’t have a large population.
While the budget went up, Caruso says that with the staffing shortage they can’t operate the facilities at full capacity. He said they have 511 licensed beds but only operate about 200, across all facilities.
For example, Caruso said that at Jackie Withrow Hospital they have 278,000 square foot facility across four buildings, but they can only operate 50 beds because of staffing issues.
He says this shows how bad staffing issue is.
” I think that tells a tremendous story, about how inefficient and ineffective we are in regard to that. Mainly because our physical plant is not suitable to run the 199 beds,” Caruso said.
During his presentation in front of the committee, he proposed two ways that short-term facilities can combat the staffing shortage.
One of them being, starting to outsource management to handle the clinical contract staff.
“Right now, every single contract staff member that we bring in, comes through our system, we have to run it through the payable system, it is a very complex process to run through the state of West Virginia to pay for those contracted staff,” he said.
The second thing he proposed was having someone come into Sharpe and Bateman Hospital’s and show them staffing models that have worked for HR at different companies. And for long-term facilities he said that they need to implement hours per patient day which measures the number of hours a patient receives from the nursing staff.
Another thing that was discussed was pay to the employees. There is a huge discrepancy among the contracted nurses and the state nurses, even though they all receive the same benefits.
Caruso said that RNs under contract make $80 an hour, while state makes $50 an hour. LPNs under contract make $57.54, while state nurses make $39.41. CNAs under contract make $39.38 and state nurses make just more than $30 an hour.