Burnout in Healthcare Careers: An Ongoing Challenge

Even before COVID-19 put healthcare workers in the spotlight, burnout was an ongoing challenge in the medical industry. It’s a high-stress job that’s often thankless. We know the effects of employee burnout on our workers and departments, what are we doing about it? If you want to work on improving the employee experience and minimizing burnout, here are a few things you can do to start.

Measure the Problem

The first step is to know that burnout exists. You need to watch for signs in your staff, such as stress, fatigue, and reduced productivity at work. It’s important to distinguish between employees having a bad day and an ongoing problem. You may even see it spreading throughout the department. The goal is to determine the root cause of burnout.

Prioritize Departments

If burnout is a widespread problem in your facility, you may have to prioritize the departments that need help fast. Burnout triggers can be very different between departments. Determine which ones have the highest burnout rates and the lowest career satisfaction and start there.

Identify Stressors

Career burnout and stress go hand in hand. What is causing stress for your employees? Is it a lack of work/life balance? Is it aspects of their day to day job that become repetitive or frustrating? Is it a lack of leadership or poor experiences with coworkers?

Increase Engagement

The single most important thing you can do for your staff is to demonstrate that they’re valued regularly. Continuously reinforce that their work saves lives. What they do directly impacts patients, and without the hard work of your entire medical staff, you cannot do what you do.

Promote Stress Reduction

You also need to provide tools that will help your team reduce stress. This can start with reevaluating your personal time off (PTO) policy or overtime schedules. You can also offer added value stress reduction tools such as yoga classes or massage therapy.

Offer Support

Burnout can sometimes become a much larger issue. If your team is struggling with their mental health, you need to provide them the tools for finding support. You also need to ensure that the team has all of the professional support they need to effectively do their job and not feel like they’re spinning their wheels.

Evaluate Progress

Regardless of what systems or programs you’ve implemented, you need to reevaluate how they’re regularly working. Take a look at how the leadership in your departments is handling the change and make adjustments as necessary.

Can your hiring policies improve retention and prevent burnout?

Call CornerStone Medical Staffing in Dallas, TX today; we have the qualified healthcare professionals that you need to staff up to prevent burnout.

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