Staffing

Program Helps War Vets Find Health Care Jobs

By Amy Lillard

Service-oriented jobs are the prime target, clinical areas could be next

Among the many challenges facing health care today, staffing shortages top the list. A new organization hopes to ease the suffering through simple matchmaking.

Hire Heroes, a group formed by the Health Careers Foundation, aims to pair wounded veterans with health care organizations desperately in need of employees. Program organizers got the idea after seeing soldiers survive wounds that would have been critical or fatal in past wars thanks to significant medical advances.

“Our veterans are trained in key skills, like leadership,” says Bayne Tippins, director of Hire Heroes. “They’ve learned discipline, and how to approach and accomplish difficult tasks. They bring so many things to the table. Their military experience translates fantastically into careers, particularly in the health care industry.”

Hire Heroes, which launched in April, has concentrated in two areas: recruiting health care companies that need and want these candidates, and recruiting veterans from Iraq, Afghanistan and other locations. To date, no veterans have been matched at a hospital. In the short term, Tippins sees Hire Heroes making an impact in support service areas, such as customer service, call centers, sales, coding and information technology. Over the long term, the program aims to match vets who have received special nursing or medical training.

Many rural health care organizations, hit especially hard by workforce shortages and repeated military call-ups, would welcome the help for their current crisis mode.

“We are attempting to alleviate some of the shortage problem by ‘growing our own’ through education and training,” says Chad Peterson, manager in the rural Northwood (N.D.) Deaconess Health Center and a member of the North Dakota Air National Guard. “But we’re still fighting an aging workforce and shrinking communities. We would welcome these men and women with open arms.”

This article 1st appeared in the August 2007 issue of HHN Magazine.

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