As the phenomenon of the "Great Resignation" continues, where millions of US workers have quit their jobs. The healthcare industry, in particular, appears to be the most impacted. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 534,000 US healthcare workers quit their jobs in August 2021 alone. The overall reasoning for this is dissatisfaction with their current employers.

Is there anything hospitals can do to protect themselves from the Great Resignation?

46% of physicians surveyed, said that improving the physician workforce experience could prevent them from leaving an organization for another employer.

The article "'Great Resignation' Hits Healthcare Hard As Physician Burnout Persists" by Jacqueline LaPointe, revealed a serious disconnect between physicians and administrators. According to the Physician Retention Survey, only 25% of physicians reported that the pandemic drove burnout. However, 37% of administrators said it was responsible for all or most physician burnout. One of the predominant causes of burnout is additional burdens such as administrative tasks.

This confirmed the idea that tackling employee burnout can't be a siloed departmental initiative. It takes the whole organization to recognize the challenge and take much needed actions.

Here are some things your healthcare organization can do to protect itself from the Great Resignation:

• Listen to your Employees: built an open forum, anonymous employee survey to spot all the challenges with the organization
• Make Changes: set up an internal team or hire an external consultants to review the current organizational process and build plans to streamline admin inefficiency within the organization.
• Implement Solutions: there are so many excuses for not fixing what is broken when solutions readily exist. There are many companies that can improve many inefficiencies in healthcare, look for solutions and advocate their implementation. For example, implementing systems like Mocingbird to streamline and simplify ongoing credentialing process can help to eliminate a large portion of the administrative burden and put compliance control back to the organization.
• Continue to Seek Feedback: build a culture of continuous feedback loop within the organization, so you stay ahead of all the potential challenges within your organization.
• Provide Growth Opportunities: show current employees that you value them even more than potential new hires by providing them with new opportunities to grow and advance. Surveys show that 68% of workers around the world are willing to retrain and learn new skills.
• Invest in Taking Care of your Employees: find ways to create a healthy work-life-balance, acknowledge personal sacrifices, subsidizes daycare, give more vacation days, mental health checkins, desirable maturity leave, decrease unnecessary tasks, let clinicians focus on what they do best - taking care of patients.
• Incentivize Loyalty: update compensation packages, compensate employees for recruiting new employees, fund additional certifications, and help with payments on student loans.

Now more than ever, healthcare organizations need to put their clinicians first and do everything in their power to decrease burnout. The research is there, focusing on your clinician experience can help protect your organization from the Great Resignation and improve job satisfaction leading to long-term retention.

No organization is perfect. It takes continuous effort to build a better workplace.

Mocingbird is a cloud-based platform that improves medicine and clinician well-being by eliminating the chaos of ongoing credentialing and delivering high-impact Continuing Medical Education. For individual clinicians, we develop a one-stop solution to validate, track, document, and calculate the CME requirements for the maintenance of their professional licenses. For healthcare organizations, we provide a management tool that offers a real-time overview of compliance for risk mitigation. Mocingbird is based in Rhode Island and was founded by Orthopedic Spine Surgeon, Dr. Ian Madom and Interventional Cardiologist, Dr. George Fernaine.