I work for a not-for-profit community healthcare provider - we're the ones that come into your home after you're discharged from the hospital, yet continue to require some form of care and/or assistance. The bulk of our business is paid from a government-related organization. This organization has mandated certain performance targets that all service providers are expected to meet.
One of these targets is impossible to meet based on province-wide shortage of qualified and competent staff. Yes, part of this availability may be based on pay, cost of living, etc, but every service provider (i.e., our competition) has the same difficulty that we have - recruiting and retaining staff.
The organization that pays us and our competition has issued many quality notifications (i.e., nonconformances) to us and our competition on the failure to meet the performance target. We typically respond with the staffing issue as part of our root cause analysis. Sure, we can implement actions to continue recruiting/retaining staff, but the resource challenge is faced by all of us.
We've even implemented some long-term actions such as meeting with our competition to find creative ways to increase enrollment at local colleges for the program that will increase the number of people qualified for the jobs we offer.
And the organization that pays us is unwilling to change their target. So, we end up spending time and money and extra resources responding to these notices, providing updates, and implementing actions that will go no where...and continue to receive these notices or have a discussion on market share if they remain open for too long.
I realize that my situation isn't audit-based, but I would think that as long as you can demonstrate that you have done the planning and training and everything possible to obtain/retain those human resources, it is an acceptable response. Some aspects of the employment market are outside of our control.