Physicians and advanced practice providers had the greatest fall in employee engagement among healthcare workers in 2024, a Press Ganey report found.
To figure out why, the American Hospital Association and Press Ganey partnered with C-suite leaders from seven healthcare systems to discuss physician experience strategies and the challenges they face today.
Here are four physician experience trends to know:
1. Managing competing priorities, including patient experience, employee experience, and safety and quality, is a common challenge for systems. Addressing them in isolation led to diluted impact, according to the report. The most successful organizations combined these priorities into a unified, strategic approach.
2. Prioritizing change and moving away from deep-rooted tradition was another challenge. Organizations regularly experienced resistance to adopting new processes, technologies or strategies. To overcome this required strong leadership, clear communication and making a strong case for the benefits to both employees and patients.
3. Creating a psychologically safe environment and reinforcing it at every opportunity should be akin to hand hygiene, the AHA said. A safe environment led to meaningful change, deeper trust, more engagement and innovation.
4. One of the greatest challenges was securing full senior management buy-in to invest in workforce experience. Securing investment in this during a resource-constrained environment starts with showing data that links physician experience to patient and financial outcomes. Sharing the benefits that other organizations are seeing, for instance, helped make action easier to take.
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