Wondering how your organization can create a thriving workplace for clinicians? Learn how three high-performing healthcare groups launched wellness initiatives and continue to foster a culture of wellness.
Featured Organizations:
- CommonSpirit Health
- National health system
- 150,000 employees over 21 states
- Physician, Advanced Practice Provider, and Employee versions of the Well-Being Index
- Wellness Leader: Dr. Keith Frey, Chief Medical Officer of Arizona division
- Regional health group
- Group practice
- 800+ employees over 240 locations
- Physician and Advanced Practice Provider versions of the Well-Being Index
- Dignity Health Medical Group – Department of Internal Medicine
- 80+ physicians
- Physician version of the Well-Being Index
- Wellness Leader: Michael Zgoda, MD, MBA, CPE
While each organization had its specific wellness goals, they took similar steps towards launching their initiatives, including…
- Understanding the reasons why healthcare leaders should prioritize staff well-being.
- Securing leadership buy-in for clinician well-being.
- Committing to meaningfully impacting employee wellness.
Reasons Why Healthcare Leaders Should Prioritize Staff Well-Being
In health systems everywhere, providers’ quality of life and professional fulfillment are impacted by increasing work demands, inefficient processes, and numerous other factors. The distress caused by these factors can lead to lower patient satisfaction, increased medical errors, high employee turnover rates, and even clinician suicide.
Reasons the three health systems were motivated to Go Beyond Burnout included…
- High-quality healthcare: Improved clinician well-being is integral to the overall delivery of safe, high-quality healthcare.
- Saving physician lives: Roughly 300 – 400 physicians die by suicide in the U.S. every year. Protecting clinicians from distress that can lead to suicidal ideation was high on the list of priorities for all three healthcare organizations.
- Less turnover: Dignity Health recognized that if they prioritized the well-being of the Department of Internal Medicine’s 80+ physicians, careers and valuable employees would be saved.
- Healthier finances: Clinician well-being impacts operational costs surrounding turnover, retraining staff, and reduced clinical hours.
Additional reasons for supporting clinician well-being include…
- Lower levels of clinician fatigue
- Improved clinician mental health
- Positive organizational culture
One final reason to support clinician wellness is to help healthcare professionals feel fulfilled in their job. When the 240-location health group conducted an initial well-being assessment, they found that only 27% of physicians, nurse practitioners, and physician assistants felt that their work had meaning. Just 33% felt that their work made a difference.
Needless to say, this was a wake-up call to the regional health group’s leadership.
How to Secure Leadership Buy-In for Clinician Well-Being
In all three case studies, wellness leaders brought one major point to executives’ attention:
Supporting clinician well-being is the moral and financially responsible obligation of the organization.
Wellness teams can support this argument by…
- Conducting an initial assessment: The regional health group was able to secure leadership buy-in by bringing awareness to the scope of provider distress via an initial wellness assessment.
- Presenting cited research: The CommonSpirit Health team leveraged national wellness data from the Well-Being Index in addition to research on the industry-wide epidemic of clinician burnout. “It’s important to have a story for the C-suite that you’ll need to influence so they can spread the message to the rest of the team,” CWO Dr. Frey points out.
- Calculating how the bottom line is impacted: With data from the validated Well-Being Index, Dignity Health measured the Department of Internal Medicine’s initial burnout rate at 57%. Additionally, physician turnover was at 13%. Dr. Zgoda and his team then calculated that they were losing around 4 physicians to burnout annually, costing Dignity Health around $1.9 million per year.
- Identifying and communicating the benefits: The benefits of supporting clinician well-being are far-reaching and long-lasting. Dr. Frey and the Professional Fulfillment Council at CommonSpirit Health communicated that supporting clinicians leads to an improved clinician experience. That then leads to improved operational excellence, opportunities to attract more talent, the ability to retain staff, and increased bandwidth to bring in more patients.
- Developing an action plan: Presenting an action plan for your wellness initiative is critical for securing buy-in. Wellness leaders should create a comprehensive plan that includes how to assess the current state of clinician well-being, measurable objectives, key stakeholders, and a detailed timeline.
Proving that supporting clinician well-being is the moral and financially responsible obligation of the organization doesn’t have to be a struggle. Through working with thousands of healthcare leaders tasked with ensuring the well-being of their teams, Well-Being Index experts have uncovered a key component for ensuring organizational success: connecting your wellness initiative to tangible outcomes.
Results of securing top-level buy-in:
- CommonSpirit Health was able to launch the Well-Being Index for its 25,000 physicians.
- The regional health group launched the Physician and Advanced Practice Provider versions of the Well-Being Index for its 800+ clinicians.
- Dignity Health’s Department of Internal Medicine was able to launch the Well-Being Index for its 80+ physicians.
If you have specific questions about how your team can gain executive buy-in for your wellness initiative, reach out to an expert at mywellbeingindex.org.
How to Meaningfully Impact Staff Wellness
Our three high-performing healthcare organizations didn’t want a one-time wellness campaign that superficially “fixed” well-being. They sought to continually monitor clinician well-being, work towards their wellness goals, and create meaningful impact in the lives of their staff.
Once the health systems received leadership buy-in, they were able to collect baseline data regarding their staff’s well-being via the validated Well-Being Index. This enabled their wellness teams to pinpoint where the most support was needed and set measurable goals to guide their efforts.
For example, the regional health group’s goals were to…
- Help providers regain a sense of fulfillment and meaning in their work
- Create an environment that cares for providers so they can care for patients
- Create individual approaches and resources to achieve wellness
- Identify and correct systematic processes that contribute to less-than-optimal well-being
- Focus on positive terminology like ‘well-being’ as opposed to negative terms like ‘burnout’
- Ensure that no staff dies of suicide
Of course, these goals aren’t achieved once and then archived. Our high-performing organizations understood that to create meaningful impact…
- A culture of well-being had to be encouraged and maintained.
- Wellness metrics needed to be tracked over time.
Encouraging and Maintaining a Supportive Wellness Culture
“A culture of wellness and professional fulfillment is the sustaining lifeforce that will keep well-being going over the next generation of physicians,” says Dr. Frey. “We should be the leadership generation that people look back and say that we owned the issue and started to create solutions.”
Ways to foster a culture of wellness in your workplace include…
- Taking an approach of empathy and kindness when addressing mental illness
- Combatting stigma by talking openly about the importance of mental health
- Rectifying micro-stressors for employees
- Leading by example from the top-down
- Building a foundation of trust
- Asking for employee feedback and acting on it
Why Ongoing Well-Being Measurement is Crucial
The need to track trends in well-being over time becomes increasingly important as organizations develop and implement wellness initiatives. To determine whether initiatives are working, changes in well-being have to be measured on a continuous basis.
Equipped with anonymized assessment data from the Well-Being Index, leaders at CommonSpirit Health can quickly see how their staff’s well-being is faring. This makes it simple to identify hotspots of distress where more or different support is needed. As CommonSpirit monitors employee well-being over time, leaders can continue tailoring the program to the needs of the staff.
The 240-location regional health group is taking a similar approach. Their wellness leaders encourage participants to reassess on a regular basis. They then use the tracking functionalities to analyze how distress levels change over time, allowing them to modify their program as needed.
The wellness tracking abilities of the Well-Being Index aren’t just useful for leadership — individual participants can also track their levels over time. This offers personal and private insight into an individual’s ups and downs with well-being, something that can inform career and health decisions.
Well-Being Results from 3 High-Performing Organizations
After implementing the Well-Being Index and additional wellness initiatives (e.g., hiring an organizational psychologist, developing a peer mentorship program, improving system processes), Dignity Health dramatically lowered physician burnout and turnover rates. The total cost of their initiatives came to $120K with a projected reduction in physician burnout of 20%. Their wellness program and implementation of the Well-Being Index saved the organization over $370K with a 210% return on investment.
The regional health group reported improved well-being scores and no employee suicides to date.
Dr. Frey is hopeful for CommonSpirit Health’s wellness journey. “As the largest nonprofit in 21 states, we knew that this would be a great endeavor that required everyone to be on board,” he says. “We are starting to see that consciousness of the burnout problem is spreading from our senior leaders to our clinical staff. And that has been very exciting.”
What can your healthcare organization do right now to support staff well-being?
It’s common for organizations to feel paralyzed by not knowing where to start regarding clinician well-being. This uncertainty, mixed with concerns about not being able to achieve wellness goals, can cause leaders to avoid starting down the path to protecting well-being.
Connect Wellness Goals to Organizational Goals
The group health organization featured here encourages all institutions that may be experiencing these fears to simply start something. Raising awareness of the issues and relating them to broader infrastructure development allowed this health group to produce tactics directly informed by those in need of support. Connecting clinician wellness goals to the broader goals of the organization is an extremely effective way of securing buy-in and moving your program forward.
Collect Accurate Data
With accurate institutional wellness data from the Well-Being Index, Dr. Zgoda and his team at Dignity Health were able to clearly demonstrate the need for clinician wellness support.
All three high-performing organizations have succeeded in supporting clinician well-being because they were proactive, secured executive buy-in, and committed to tracking well-being over time.
For more information and to read the full case studies of the three organizations mentioned in this article, visit mywellbeingindex.org.
