In Part One, we talked about knowing what to remove from a wound care program before healing can happen. But once you've done that work, once you know what's not working and what needs to change, the next question is almost always: okay, so who do we actually need, and where do we find them?
When I first started at Wound Care Advantage, I was asked to run a report. Straightforward enough, except that half the column headers were acronyms I had never seen before in my life. Not general healthcare acronyms. Wound care acronyms. The niche-within-the-niche kind.
So I did what any reasonable person does when they don't know something: I Googled it. And got nothing useful back, because wound care is specific enough that the internet wasn't going to save me. At that point I had two options. Sit there and pretend I understood the report, or reluctantly reach out to the CNO and hope she didn't immediately question every hiring decision that led to me being there.
She was, thankfully, completely unfazed. Told me there were so many acronyms in wound care that even people who had been in it for years still had to look things up sometimes. The problem wasn't that I didn't know. It was that I didn't yet know who to ask.
Hospitals considering a transition away from their management company tend to find themselves in a version of that same moment, except the questions aren't clinical. They're things like: how many nurses do we need? Do we need a program director or a clinical coordinator or both? Where do we look for these people? And what is this actually going to cost us?
Hospitals aren't bad at hiring. They're paralyzed because they've never had to hire their own team before.
When someone else handles the hiring, the cost becomes invisible.
Under a management company model, staffing is a pass-through. The hospital pays for it, but the line item is bundled so neatly into the arrangement that nobody ever really has to look at it. No one sits down and says, "our wound care RN costs X and our program director costs Y." It just… gets paid. Very tidily. Very quietly.
Which is fine, until a hospital starts thinking about going independent and realizes they've been paying for a full team for years without ever seeing an itemized receipt. They don't know what a wound care tech earns in their market. They've never had to know. The bill was always there, it just had very convenient packaging.
This is the part that stops a lot of conversations before they start. Not the clinical piece. The people piece.
The team you need is already out there.
Here's what we tell hospitals when this comes up, and we mean it: your best team is already in your community.
Wound care and hyperbaric professionals are not mythical creatures who only exist inside large management company networks. They live and work in your market. Some are already in your hospital in adjacent roles. Some are in nearby facilities and quietly looking. The talent is there, the missing piece is usually just knowing what you're building and where to look.
And that starts with getting clear on the basics. Do you need a program director who owns clinical operations, or a clinical coordinator who supports them? Are those the same role in your program or two different ones? How many FTEs make sense for your volume? What does competitive compensation look like in your geography specifically, not a national benchmark that may or may not reflect what candidates in your market are actually being offered?
These are answerable questions. They just require someone who has built this before.
What WCA's HR support actually looks like.
This is a significant part of what we do at Wound Care Advantage, and it surprises people who think of us primarily as a clinical consulting partner.
When a hospital is serious about building their own team, we start by helping them figure out what they actually need, not what sounds right, not what their previous management company had, but what makes sense for their program, their volume, and their budget. That means walking through the roles, the reporting structure, the credentialing requirements, and what the compensation picture realistically looks like in their specific market.
From there, we support the recruiting process. Job descriptions that reflect what the role actually is. Interview frameworks that help identify candidates who understand the specialized nature of wound care. Onboarding structure that sets people up to stay.
Some programs need the full build. Others just need help with one hard-to-fill role, or a compensation structure that keeps losing candidates at the offer stage. We work around what the program actually needs, not a predetermined package.
You can do this. You just don't have to figure it out alone.
The hospitals that successfully build their own programs aren't the ones with the most HR experience or the biggest internal recruiting teams. They're the ones who got clear on what they needed, found the right people to help them get there, and stopped assuming the task was harder than it actually was.
About Wound Care Advantage
Wound Care Advantage (WCA) is the nation's leading wound center consultancy, helping hospital networks optimize clinical outcomes, compliance, and profitability across their wound care and hyperbaric medicine programs. Founded 24 years ago on the mission that every community deserves access to advanced wound care and hyperbaric medicine, WCA has partnered with over 200 wound centers nationwide. Learn more at thewca.com.
