San Angelo-based Shannon Health System, the largest healthcare provider for West Texas’ Concho Valley and surrounding areas, serves a growing community through a 600-bed hospital, nationally recognized cardiac and stroke programs, Level III trauma and Level II NICU facilities, and more than 350 providers in 40 medical specialties across 25 clinical locations.
Shane Plymell, president and chief executive officer who leads the institution and its more than 4,000 employees, recently spoke with Bright Horizons about how the organization stays true to its mission and continues to grow.
Bright Horizons: Shane, you’ve been the CEO of Shannon Medical System since 2017 and held key roles with the organization for years before that. Can you tell us about the culture you're creating and what makes your organization different from others?
Shane: We’re made up of both hospitals and clinics. People refer to us as “Shannon.” The shorter name keeps employees from getting hung up on whether they work in the hospital or the clinic. It makes us more of a team.
Our mission is to provide exceptional healthcare to our families, friends, and neighbors — treating them like our closest loved ones. When we do that, we can provide exceptional care. We envision our mission as a wheel, with our people at the top. Moving clockwise, there’s quality, service, innovation, growth, and operations.
Our biggest strength is our people. It’s also one of our biggest weaknesses. Talent is scarce; we have to be successful in our ability to recruit and retain people.
Bright Horizons: It sounds like Shannon’s family orientation and your approach to patient care is creating a strong culture, but there's still pressure to attract talent. Can you describe some of the strategies you're using to gain and retain employees, especially clinical staff?
Shane: I've had the privilege of working at Shannon since about 1998. From a labor force perspective, I’ve never seen a more challenging environment than the one we’re experiencing. It impacts the day-to-day of our doctors, staff and the patients and families we care for.
We're taking both a short and long-term view. Short term we’re trying to ensure we have competitive compensation rates to attract talent. Once you have people in your system, you have to build an environment that retains them. As a regional system, we compete for talent with larger healthcare systems. Our turnover rate for physicians is less than 1%. We're not quite there yet with our staff. So, we’re trying to better understand what our workforce needs. For example, we’re trying to introduce more flexibility for workers, even though that presents challenges.
We’re also looking at benefits like child care services. We had to get serious about it when the pandemic hit. With schools shut down, our staff with young families had difficulty coming to work. We quickly realized we needed our own child care services.
It’s important for parents to feel safe leaving their children when coming to work. So, we started the process of looking for a good partner and became really comfortable with Bright Horizons’ expertise. We found a church near us with space to lease and we brought in Bright Horizons to manage our child care center.
Because healthcare workers have non-traditional schedules, our child care center is open non-traditional hours. Some team members work three 12-hour shifts. Traditional 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. child care services don’t support that scenario. So Bright Horizons opens our center early and stays open late.
Bright Horizons: Yes, we’ve definitely found that healthcare hours are different. It’s great to see you supporting working families’ child care needs. Has your child care program helped you attract and retain employees as you continue to expand?
Shane: The child care center has been really well received. The facility and the people are just amazing. Bright Horizons did a really nice job of hiring the right people. It has a great culture. It's clean. It's very safe; to get in, you need a badge to access the center. That makes parents feel more secure.
I recently walked in with a doctor who was dropping off her two children. She told me how amazing it is having the center. She basically drops off her kids, parks across the street, and walks to the hospital. She just loves the flexibility and convenience the center provides because she works a 7-to-7 shift. In the middle of one shift she picked up her son to take him to a doctor's appointment. She returned and dropped him off at child care then went back to work. She knows that she can work her shift, walk over, and see her children if she wants to. She knows they're close, safe, and being well taken care of. It gives her peace of mind while she’s working.
There’s so much stress and burnout today, not just at work, but at home, too. Anywhere we can take a little of the edge off is a big plus for our people.
Bright Horizons: You’re reinforcing what we’re hearing from other clients: stress and burnout make child care benefits compelling, especially when they’re onsite centers. As you think about the benefit from an ROI perspective, where are you seeing that the most?
Shane: Child care is a huge benefit. Let me give you an example. In our emergency room we have a group of employees with young families. Before we had child care, they could only work when their spouses were available to care for the kids. We could never get them on a steady schedule. Having child care services now allows them to work a regular schedule. That helped us plug a lot of unfilled shift holes.
Also, healthcare uses contract staffing quite a bit to cover schedule needs that cannot be met by our employees, because, no matter what, you have to take care of your patients. Unfortunately, contractors come at a premium that’s a lot more than what an employed team members costs.
Our focus has been to reduce contract labor use, and child care services have helped us do that by providing a resource for families who were previously limited by inadequate child care options. At peak, we were up to 177 contract people. We’re down to about 93, with a goal to get to between 10 and 15. Having child care helped reduce our contract labor costs considerably.
Bright Horizons: It’s good that child care benefits helped you get contract staffing under control. A lot of hospitals have had to supplement their workforce with outside help because of shortages caused by the pandemic. Now we’re seeing baby boomers reach retirement age and changes in other generational groups. Can you give us some insight into your long-term strategy and how it touches on such groups within the workforce?
Shane: For older workers and those who can’t or don’t want to work longer shifts, we’ve begun offering a four-to-six-hour shift during peak times and in the morning so people can have afternoons off. We recently had a pharmacist who was retiring and decided to continue working on Mondays, a busy time for us. What we do for retirees is “reverse engineer” the hours they can work so it doesn’t impact their retirement benefits.
We also saw healthcare education enrollments drop because of the pandemic. We work closely with two amazing local institutions: Angelo State University and Howard College. We’re finally seeing enrollments climb in professions like nursing, LPNs, respiratory therapists, respiratory techs, pharmacy techs, and medical assistants.
We offer scholarships. If you’re from our 24-county area and want to go into a hard-to-fill healthcare profession, we’ll help fund it. In return, we ask that you work for us for several years. Since launching, we’ve enrolled 30+ people.
Even with these efforts, we have approximately 400 open positions, about 10% of our workforce. It’s not just clinical positions; it’s across the board: patient account reps, receptionists, housekeeping, food service, etc.
Bright Horizons: Shane, have you considered looking at career pathways, where you map out how someone in food service, for example, can become a nurse via education certifications? Is that part of your long-term strategy?
Shane: It’s interesting you ask. Recently, we met with the Boy Scouts of America and with one the largest school districts in San Angelo. We learned that there are almost 250 high school students who want to go into healthcare, but they don’t know the different avenues of healthcare. We have a plan to work with surrounding school systems and bring students in about once a week to expose them to different healthcare roles and professions. They could also be candidates for our scholarships.
Bright Horizons: It’s great to see you reaching out to inspire these students. It’s an innovative thing to do, which reminds me that innovation is one of your pillars. Can you talk about why innovation is an important strategy for Shannon?
Shane: We have an innovation department. Monthly, we look at a few innovative companies through a co-op we belong to with other healthcare facilities. Currently, we’re a beta site and investor for Moxi robots.
Moxi is helping us reengineer some processes and work more efficiently, for example fetch supplies, saving steps and giving nurses more time to focus on patient care. The robots can move around our facility, get on and off elevators, and actually push elevator buttons.
Our innovation department is helping us adopt other types of automation. We’re now using telehealth to replace the evening on-call shifts our ICU pulmonologists used to be responsible for after working full days. To provide better work/life balance, we’re doing tele ICU which gives us access to a hub of pulmonologists who are available from 7 p.m. to 7 a.m. They’re securely tied into our system so they can see patient vitals and respond quickly.
The innovation team also introduced an internal communication and rewards platform called “the Shannon Hub.” The Hub allows us to communicate important information to and recognize our employees for outstanding service with “Golden Shamrocks” that have monetary value and can be used on Amazon.
Bright Horizons: People come to the healthcare field because they want to care for patients. The way you’re using innovation shows employees you’re serious about removing barriers that take time away from patient care, make days feel longer, and cause stress. I'm sure they applaud these investments. It shows you're listening.
Shane: Thank you. We ask ourselves all the time if what we're doing is adding value to patient care. If it isn't, why are we doing it?
For example, when you go to a nursing unit, often what you see is nurses looking at computer screens and typing away. We’ve been looking at what we're documenting to see if it’s really benefiting and adding value to our patients. Another example is finding ways to put supplies where they’re needed most to minimize steps.
We're constantly looking at ways to eliminate waste. They say in healthcare that 30% of what is done doesn’t add value to patient care. We're trying to figure out what that 30% is and stop doing it.
Bright Horizons: You can see real return in dollars where you're reducing waste. But you’re also increasing the wellbeing of your employees, making their jobs easier, and creating an environment where they want to keep working. Thank you for sharing your challenges, strategies for addressing them, and successes. It’s been a pleasure talking to you.
