The Role of Employee Background Check Services in Ensuring Safe Healthcare Hiring

The healthcare industry is currently challenged by staffing concerns. Many sectors of the industry are badly understaffed, which can lead to rapid hiring of anyone who has the needed licenses and certifications.

Unfortunately, not every potential employee with the right pieces of paper is actually a good fit.

How can a hiring manager or a recruiter cover all their bases and protect themselves from making an expensive hire–only to find unforeseen problems with the new employee within a few weeks?

Employee background check services are an important component of healthcare hiring. Whatever sector of healthcare is your specialty, a background check can flag potential problems that the employee may not be willing to disclose.

Background checks are a great way to ensure that certain problems and complications will not arise among your new hires. Below are just some of the possible areas where risk is mitigated and compliance is maintained by the use of background checks.

Regulatory Compliance

Not least among the reasons to have thorough background checks is that for some positions, federal and/or state regulations require background checks.

This may include (but not be limited to) positions with access to sensitive personal information, positions with access to pharmaceuticals with a high street value, and positions in close contact with vulnerable patients.

Trying to shorten the hiring process by skipping the background check can backfire badly, if there is a criminal incident–or simply because an audit reveals that the hiring regulations are not being followed properly.

Financial and Legal Risk

In the medical field, reputation is vitally important.

A couple of bad reviews due to a bad hire who begins to negatively impact patients can lead to a dramatic loss of patients, and the subsequent loss of revenue can itself be fatal to a struggling practice.

Factor in the possibility of a lawsuit due to the actions of an employee who should never have been hired, and financial ruin may await.

Negligent hiring practices can lead to far more problems than a simple matter of short staffing, and the trust of your patients must always be a top priority.

Patient Safety

Patients need to feel safe and well cared for when they are in your practice.

If even one or two patients have cases of identity theft that are traced back to your office, and you may suddenly find that you have no patients.

And cases of any type of assault by employees upon patients will leave your practice in dire straits–not to mention vulnerable to criminal charges and litigation.

Desperation for adequate staffing can make it tempting to take risks on possible employees, but if any kind of criminal activity results your whole practice will suffer.

Encourage Professionalism

Every practice relies on an existing staff of employees with integrity and professionalism. Nothing is more demoralizing to this, the backbone of your practice, than a batch of new hires who lack this framework and moral code.

The result of this demoralization is a loss of trust in the leadership of the practice, schisms among the personnel, and possible loss of your most valuable employees.

This impact can be even further exacerbated if employees notice that hiring regulations are being ignored. This can cause an irreparable breach of trust that can send even the most loyal of employees looking elsewhere.

Ensuring that all new hires have a clean record is a good first step to preventing the anger, frustration and discontentment that can result from a bad batch of hires.

Short Staff Is Better Than Bad Staff

While short staffed practices face difficult challenges in providing quality patient care and in meeting regulatory complliance–not to mention the negative impact on morale–hiring staff who have criminal history or other problematic information in their background checks can quickly cause a spiral from which a practice may not recover.

Ensure that you make the right hires, not just filling positions for the sake of having more people in positions. Use employee background checks to prevent the consequences of poor hires.