To retain nurses and other staffers, hospitals are opening child care centers

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When Jennifer Lucier and her husband found out they were expecting a baby in 2016, they immediately made three phone calls.

The first was to her mother. The second was to her husband's family. And the third was to the Roper St. Francis Healthcare Learning Center.

That last call, she felt, was particularly urgent. Lucier wanted to secure a spot for her unborn infant on the day care's long waiting list.

Lucier works as a cardiovascular ICU nurse for Roper St. Francis Healthcare, the only hospital system around Charleston, South Carolina, that operates a child care center for the children of its employees.

The catch is there isn't room for everyone. Roper St. Francis employs 5,000 people, and its day care can accommodate only 130 infants and children. More than 100 children typically sit on that waiting list. Lucier's newborn was 9 months old before an opening became available.

"We were ecstatic," said Lucier, who also gave birth to twins in 2020. Her children are still enrolled in the Learning Center.

Roper St. Francis Healthcare opened the facility more than 30 years ago to address a perennial human resources problem: recruitment and retention. Today, it remains one of the relatively few hospital systems in the United States to operate a full-time child care center for its employees, though that appears to be changing. Some hospitals are now considering child care centers as a means of solving one of the pandemic era's big challenges: persuading employees to stay.

Nationally, only about 1 in 10 workers have access to employer programs that cover some or all of the costs for child care services — either on the job site or off — according to a report published last year by the U.S. Department of Labor. The health sector seems to be doing more: About one-third of U.S. hospitals offer child care benefits.

But the data obscures the wide variation of those benefits. Some hospitals provide access only to backup care so parents can make last-minute arrangements for sick children. Even among hospitals that offer more robust benefits, many parents, like Lucier, end up spending time on a waiting list.

Hospitals scrambled at the beginning of the pandemic to accommodate clinical staff members who suddenly found themselves unable to both work and care for their kids. More than two years later, most do not offer permanent solutions for parents facing the country's ongoing child care crisis. Meanwhile, thousands of child care providers, ranging from small, at-home programs to large day care facilities, have closed since early 2020, making it even more difficult for families to secure care than it was for Lucier when she first gave birth.

These challenges are felt across all business sectors. A benefits report published by Care.com this year estimated that at least 4 million U.S. workers resigned each month during the second half of 2021, nearly half of them citing that they were struggling with child care or senior care challenges.

But retention has become a particularly urgent issue when it comes to nurses, who are overwhelmingly women and who have resigned from hospitals in huge numbers during the pandemic, citing burnout, stressful working conditions, and other workplace problems. In fact, the number of registered nurses in the U.S. dropped by more than 100,000 last year — "a far greater drop than ever observed over the past four decades," according to a report published by Health Affairs. In a recent McKinsey & Co. survey involving hundreds of nurses, 32% indicated they may leave their current position within the next year.

"People are leaving the industry because they're not able to balance work and life," said Priya Krishnan, senior vice president of client relations for Bright Horizons, the largest provider of employer-sponsored child care in the country.

Bright Horizons operates 82 hospital-based child care centers out of 655 centers it runs across the country. Krishnan said most of the recent conversations the company is having with potential clients have been with hospitals.

"Retention is the biggest reason they're thinking about this," she said.

The federal government offers businesses an annual tax credit worth up to $150,000 for providing child care to employees. Indirect financial incentives also exist. According to the 2022 "National Health Care Retention & RN Staffing Report" published by NSI Nursing Solutions, hospitals lose an average of about $46,000 when a bedside nurse resigns, which equaled about $7 million in nursing turnover costs for the average hospital in 2021.

But anecdotal evidence offered by Roper St. Francis suggests that employees whose children are enrolled in the Learning Center are much less likely to leave. The system experienced significant turnover during the pandemic, said Melanie Stith, its vice president for human resources. But during that time, she said, only two employees whose children attended the Learning Center resigned.