In a first-of-its-kind project in South Dakota, the small hospital in this southern Black Hills town is investing in a subdivision project to provide housing for its employees.Fall River Health Services, an independent nonprofit medical center in Hot Springs, is paying $2.3 million of the overall $3.4 million cost of infrastructure for a subdivision that could create 48 new affordable housing units a few hundred yards from the hospital campus.Like many South Dakota employers, Fall River Health is enduring a long-range worker shortage that has put pressure on its existing staff and driven up costs due to hiring of expensive traveling, short-term medical employees.As of May 29, the hospital had 19 job openings, most of them in direct patient care, a shortage of 10% of its needed workforce of 190. In the past couple years, the hospital has lost dozens of prospective health care workers because they couldn’t find affordable or suitable local housing, said Jesse Naze, chief financial officer at Fall River Health.
“You can’t stop providing care, so we need workforce to care for our local population,” Naze told News Watch in an interview. “It’s not wages or benefits keeping employees away, it’s simply that housing just isn’t available.”
