Dillon, Addo: Recruitment and retention bonuses initiated to help address staffing challenges

Deborah Addo, executive vice president and chief operating officer at Penn State Health, and Dr. Peter Dillon, executive vice president and chief clinical officer, emailed employees across the health system Wednesday about a $15,000 bonus to registered nurses to help address a staffing shortage:

Good morning,

As CEO Steve Massini said last week in his message to our workforce, staffing across our organization – and particularly on the front lines – is a significant challenge right now. Following new recommendations by the Centers for Disease Control regarding isolation and testing, we recently made changes to our return-to-work policy that allows some employees who tested positive for COVID-19 or who were exposed to the illness to return to work sooner under specific conditions. This change gives operational leaders more flexibility to address employee shortages when patient volumes threaten our ability to provide quality care with existing staff.

Today we want to notify you of another important initiative to help stabilize our workforce.

Our people are the heart of our organization, and to recruit and retain top talent, we annually assess and adjust our compensation for all positions within Penn State Health. Our HR team just launched its 2022 assessment, and with the market changing so rapidly right now—especially in health care—we recognize we are trailing the local market for some roles.

Right now we need to address one specific pressing need – our nursing shortage. Nurses are the hands that most touch our patients, and we cannot care for our community without them. Every health system and staffing agency in the country is competing for nurses, and most are offering recruitment bonuses. Penn State Health last year offered recruitment bonuses to nurses and other clinicians as we built our workforces at Hampden and Holy Spirit medical centers.

We are now offering recruitment bonuses across our health system to newly hired nurses. More important, as a way to reassure our existing nurses that they don’t need to look elsewhere for a career home that values them today and for the long term, we are awarding all full-time and part-time RNs and graduate nurses in inpatient and outpatient direct care roles with a $15,000 bonus retention bonus. To collect the full bonus, they will need to stay with our organization for at least a year. Details will be shared directly with affected nurses in the coming days.

Additionally, all employees have the opportunity to earn a referral bonus of up to $7,500 if someone you refer to Penn State Health for certain, hard-to-recruit positions is hired. You can learn more about our referral bonus program here.

We cannot achieve our vision of becoming Pennsylvania’s most trusted health care organization without a workforce that knows it is valued and appreciated. We’re grateful that amid the many challenges of the pandemic, we’ve been able to continue paying our entire Penn State Health family and to raise our minimum wage to $15 an hour. We’ve given out nearly $140,000 in grants through our employee assistance program to help colleagues who are facing financial struggles due to unforeseen circumstances.

Our next move will be to critically evaluate other roles within our organization to ensure our compensation empowers us to not only recruit the best new talent, but to retain and engage the workforce that has stood with us through this pandemic and helps us to be our very best every day for our community.

Thank you for helping us be our very best for our community.

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