MU Health gets creative to recruit experienced nurses

COLUMBIA, Mo-MU Health is searching for experienced nurses and they are offering incentives to current employees to help find them.

The demand for nurses has skyrocketed the past few years. Hospitals are seeing a rise in patients because of the easier access to health care and higher life spans.

From 2009 to 2015, the need for nurses went from 4% to 12% in just Central Missouri, and according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor in just eight years its predicted that there will be over one million jobs in the nursing field.

The Dean of Sinclair School of Nursing, Judith Fitzgerald Miller, says the need will never go down. “Nurses are needed wherever people are found, so the potential for our people to be employed whether that be jails or schools or community health agencies, clinics, wherever.”

In order to stay on top of the growing need MU Health released an incentive program where they are going to offer current employees money to help them find more nurses. They are offering an incentive of $10,000 for each qualified RN they recruit to work in internal medicine, psychiatric nor neuroscience inpatient units. Non-supervisory staff at the university’s academic medical center can also receive a $5,000 incentive for recruiting RNs hired for any other bedside nursing careers.

The employees that successfully recruit RNs will also have an added bonus. They will be entered into win an all-expense paid trip for four to Hawaii.

So far the program has been successful. MU Health Care’s Director of Talent Acquisition, Peter Callan, said the program just started last Wednesday and they are already receiving an enormous amount of responses from their staff.

The incentives will end on December 31st.

MU Health care is also sponsoring a nurse career fair from 3 to 10 p.m. on Wednesday, June 8th on the second-floor of mezzanine of University Hospital

For more information on nursing positions and employee incentives, click here.

Along with the growing need for nurses, the University of Missouri’s School of Nursing is looking to expand their program.