"Would I ever leave this company? Look, I'm all about loyalty. In fact, I feel like part of what I'm being paid for here is my loyalty. But if there were somewhere else that valued loyalty more highly, I'm going wherever they value loyalty the most."
Dwight Schrute, of 'The Office'
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Majority in Wisconsin say health care system broken in state, universal health care favored
By: Charles Brace /The Daily Cardinal - December 13, 2007
The majority of Wisconsin residents think there are major problems with health care in the state, according to a poll released in late December.
The recent University of Wisconsin Survey Center poll, which comes only a few days after a Harvard University Institute of Politics survey, said health care was the second most important issue to voters aged 18 to 24. According to the poll, 50 percent of state residents feel health care in Wisconsin has major problems and 12 percent said the health care system is in a "state of crisis."
Fifty-one percent of Wisconsinites favor some form of state government-run health care that covers all residents, the poll said. Sixty-one percent said they favored tax-free health savings accounts to pay for health care costs.
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MORE QUOTES...
"Man will occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of the time he will pick himself up and continue on."
Winston Churchill
"When I'm losing, they call me nuts. When I'm winning, they call me eccentric."
Al McGuire
1928 - 2001
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How much turnover can your organization afford?
Turnover is estimated to cost anywhere from 25% to 100% or more of an employee's annual salary. Some of these costs are:
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Recruitment, advertising and marketing the open position.
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Overtime pay or temporary agency staff to cover the open position.
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Human resources, departmental and management time to recruit, hire, train and orient the new employee.
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Lapses in quality and productivity while using agency staff or until the new employee learns policies, procedures and standards.
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Reductions in patient and physician satisfaction due to loss of a caregiver they've come to trust.
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Increased stress and workload on remaining staff. With corresponding decrease in staff morale.
All this often results in additional turnover and poor patient, family and physician service. | |
Greetings!
Saving nurse Ryan
When asked what their organization's resolutions for 2008 should be, many people who responded to the January survey said employee retention must be high on the list. So, what can you do to reduce turnover?
Many companies and healthcare providers go out of their way to say that employees are their most important asset, but few consistently demonstrate a commitment to this ideal. In a recent Forbes Magazine commentary, Bernadette Kenny said "All too many employees have come to regard corporations as promise breakers and, as such, hypocritical and untrustworthy. "
One positive track, suggested by Dr. Wilson in his article below, is to find ways to reduce stress. As you might imagine, the payoff for employees and employers alike can be substantial.
Studies have shown that organizations with high employee satisfaction also had high patient/resident satisfaction. This is hardly surprising. Both result from strong leadership that builds into the organization a culture of quality and an attitude which insists on excellent service for employees, patients and families. The result is lower turnover, loyal employees and satisfied patients. The result is that nurse Ryan continues to provide excellent care to patients.
Click on the link at the bottom of the page to see the survey responses.
What do you think? Email me.
Ken Bast
KenBast@MgtConsultinginHealthcare.com |
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The Bottom Line Consequences of Stress
Bruce C. Wilson, MD
Stress is killing us--usually slowly, but not always so. Research in this area over the past 15 years has shed quite a bit of light on what happens when the human stress response is turned on. You should first understand that the human stress response was built into us about 200,000 years ago when we were walking around in the same zip code as saber-toothed tigers. It was important to have a system that was activated immediately so that we could avoid becoming the tiger's lunch.
Until recently, we've viewed the stress response as rather simple. The nervous system squirts adrenaline into bloodstream causing heart rate and blood pressure to go up, which is good, because it allows you to run faster and potentially avoid your body parts ending up in the tiger's mouth. This is commonly called the "fight or flight" response. In the last few years, research has revealed that it's not so simple--1400 biochemical reactions are now known to occur in the cascade of the human stress response.
We now know that many diseases are directly or indirectly associated with stress. In the October 10 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association, there were three detailed articles on how stress is directly and causatively linked to the very diseases that are killing most of us. A couple of things are striking about that. First, there are no more tigers. Other than a very occasional threat to our survival (drunk drivers, criminals with guns, etc.), we don't live in an environment where we might be killed at any turn. But our nervous systems continue to express this stress response, and for lots of little things like traffic jams, family issues, budget decisions, people in front of us in checkout lines at the grocery store - you fill in the blanks. That's the second paradox; that our survival chemistry is actually killing us.
Further, we've learned that chronic stress changes our emotions, our perceptions and our performance. Job satisfaction, customer satisfaction, days off work, employee health care expenditures, occupational errors and many other things are now seen to be directly related to stress. The Institute of HeartMath in California has done much of the research you've just read about. And they've developed scientifically based, very easily learned tools to reverse stress in the moment, which is unique in that all of our other stress-breakers need to wait until later to be engaged in, leaving us to bathe in the stress response almost continually.
HeartMath tools have been taught in simple seminars in many health care institutions as well as Fortune 100 companies. Delnor Hospital in suburban Chicago dropped their nurse turnover rates from 28% to 6%, saving over $800,000 in the first year and every year since (they are in their sixth year of the program). Swedish Hospital in Denver saved roughly $4M the first year. Duke, Stanford, University of North Carlolina, The Mayo Clinic, and many other hospitals of all sizes and types are now using the HeartMath programs with similar results.
The stresses in health care are only going to get worse. Teaching people in the field (or any other field) to respond differently has lowered absenteeism and health care costs, improved job satisfaction and performance, resulted in fewer errors, and created more balance in people's lives.
Dr. Wilson, a cardiologist from Milwaukee, is the Medical Director of HeartMath. For more information, visit www.heartmatters.md. He can be reached at 262-241-1441.
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FREE
15 page booklet
An Innovative Approach to Quality Management
Email me your name and street address and I'll send you the booklet via U.S. Mail.
Check the Website. www.MgtConsultinginHealthcare.com
Email Me.
Newsletter Archive Page.
(see past issues)
February 2008 Survey Results.
(see past and current results)
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