Staff Burnout: Here Today, Gone Tomorrow

Online, October 5, 2010 (Newswire.com) - With mounting stress in the physician's office, increasing workloads, and dealing with disgruntled patients, it's easy for staff members to burnout. Staff burnout happens when employees feel overwhelmed and become emotionally drained. This can occur for a number of reasons and typically causes a high employee turnover rate.

A high turnover rate can significantly harm a medical practice or organization. In fact, 40% of medical practices reported high turnover among their receptionists last year alone. This presents problems because practices find it difficult to provide the consistent care and familiarity that patients prefer. With new employees coming and going, it makes it difficult for anyone to get a grasp of how things are done within the practice. Patients easily detect this and get frustrated with the confused new employee who is having difficulty making their appointment on the computer or processing their co-payment. Not to mention it costs up to one and half times an employee's salary to replace them.

"Hiring mistakes cost practices thousands of dollars and many headaches! The wrong fit for your organization can also influence the attitudes of your current employees and put a real strain on your patient-focused culture," says Jamie Verkamp, director of growth and development at (e)Merge. "Unfortunately, we see it every day; a practice has an opening for a front line employee that must be filled right away, so the first person to apply is hired. They spend the next 12 months dealing with the issues that ensue off of that snap decision. Hiring is much more strategic than many managers and organizations realize."

To adjust to the demand of the healthcare industry's HR concerns, (e)Merge now provides a variety of human resources training topics including: Diagnosing Critical Management Derailers within Your Organization, Why Smart Employees Under perform and 7 Hiring Hazards to Avoid, Simple Hiring Strategies for Today's Medical Office, as well as Attracting and Retaining the Very Best People. "Through our years of medical mystery shopping of organizations across the country, we've discovered a link between many patient experience related issues and long-standing HR issues in the office. Before we can assist our clients in making changes that will increase their bottom line, we have to provide them with the tools and understanding they need to fix underlying issues, like how they treat their people", states Verkamp. These topics are designed to improve management and human resources strategies in order to increase employee satisfaction, resulting in the ability to improve patient perception ratings and allow you to grow your practice.

(e)Merge is a medical practice growth consulting firm specializing in providing innovative, patient-centric marketing initiatives and medical mystery shopping services that enhance patient experiences to increase referrals. Our programs are designed to strategically achieve sustained patient volume growth for medical practices and health organizations. For more information, please contact us toll free at 1.877.362.6584, visit us at www.emergewithus.com, or follow us on Twitter at www.twitter.com/eMergeMD.