Recruitment is a vital factor for Phoebe, which has 49 physician openings

ALBANY — It’s the kind of thing you hear when you run a hospital that’s not in a major city or is not affiliated with one of the big health care systems that gobbles up smaller facilities like Pac-Man when he’s on a roll.

“I heard all the cardiac doctors just walked out, leaving the hospital with no one to care for heart patients.”

Scott Steiner offers a world-weary smile, one that says, “Yeah, I’ve heard it before.”

As it turns out, three of Phoebe Putney Health System’s cardiac specialists did recently bid farewell to Steiner and Phoebe. There was, however, no mass walkout, as rumor had it.

“We did some of our cardiac docs leave, but there was no mass exodus,” Steiner, the Phoebe system’s president and CEO said. “When you’re already short physicians, something like that tends to stand out more, though. 

“What people don’t get is that it’s difficult for a hospital system in a place like Albany to recruit specialty doctors. When you recruit them, you have to recruit their families, too. You can tell them from personal experience how the cost of living and quality of life here are so good, but most doctors who are trained in these specialty areas come from big cities. They expect wherever they are to be like it was for them where they grew up. They tend to think they need a dozen coffee shops, name restaurants, events every night.”

Steiner offers the recent loss of cardiac specialists as an example.

“Mostly, it was just family issues,” he said. “One doctor’s spouse said she was ‘miserable’ here; another said he was just tired of the daily grind. We’re already having to pay 10, 15, 20% more than hospitals in larger cities to get folks to come here, but at some point it comes down to convincing them that their careers will be better off if they came to Albany rather than Atlanta, Savannah, Tallahassee.”

Steiner and Phoebe have certainly had success bringing top-flight specialists to Albany, and the plan to bring $250 million in new facilities, including a state-of-the-art Trauma and Critical Care Tower set to open early next year, will no doubt help. But still, the Phoebe CEO notes, despite its ongoing recruitment efforts, Phoebe has 49 openings for physicians.

“We can tell potential hires that the Gulf beaches are only three hours away, it’s an easy trip to Atlanta, that there are schools that provide a quality education,” he said. “But when they make a move, generally, they are moving away from their families, and the ones who have children are leaving behind the reliable babysitters that families offer. And if they are single, they want to know what places they can go to to meet other singles. 

“Look, it’s no different than anywhere else. It’s the same thing when Procter & Gamble recruits those talented young engineers to come here. Things like finding friends, away-from-work activities, safety and the support of family are all issues that enter into it. It’s not just Phoebe or P&G recruiting these professionals, it’s the entire community.”

And now, with the recent announcement that Lee County’s dormant plans to build a hospital have been revived, Steiner said another element is thrown into the mix.

“Essentially, when you have a new facility like that, you’re going to be fighting over the same talent base, which makes things just a bit more difficult,” he said.

Retirement and other such elements add to the attrition rate at smaller, rural and even larger hospitals like Phoebe in one of the country’s poorest Congressional districts. It’s a problem that experts say will get much worse before it might possibly start getting better.

“Things have kind of leveled out when it comes to the number of retirees in relation to the new graduates,” Steiner said. “But as technology advances, these professionals are required to do more and more. These folks are only human; they can only do so much. And training is intense.

“In health care today, by the time a doctor completes his or her first 10 years, they are usually on their third employment. We hope to announce a relationship soon with a nationally known medical school that we think will bring more residents to the area. And when you can bring more residents on board, you’ll be able to recruit more physicians. It could be a game-changer for us. We sure hope so.”

Special Photo: Phoebe