Staff retention in healthcare and emergency response is a significant issue in most countries. Growing populations, shrinking budgets and a series of challenging global events, ranging from recessions to pandemics, mean healthcare and emergency response services are more stretched than ever before. This has placed considerable pressure on the employees delivering these services, resulting in high staff turnover.
High staff turnover is costly (recruitment and training are expensive processes), destabilising, and places more pressure on long-term staff. Understandably, many healthcare and emergency response organisations are now focusing on developing and deploying effective staff retention strategies in healthcare settings. Increasingly, they are also turning to advanced digital solutions, like those in the Omda Emergency portfolio.
Driving factors for high turnover
High turnover in emergency response and healthcare more generally is caused by myriad factors; some are context-specific, others are more general and tend to apply across workplaces, regions and even nations. Here, we have highlighted five core driving factors that are considered an issue in most modern healthcare systems.
1. Compensation
The primary factors driving dissatisfaction among professionals in the healthcare sector are pay and benefits. Many healthcare workers feel undervalued and underpaid, making the switch to a less stressful but equally well-paid or better-paid career an attractive option. This is evident in the recent healthcare strikes in the UK, Sweden, Portugal and Germany. Studies suggest that, across all roles, only 26% of NHS employees are satisfied with their compensation package. The figure falls to 16% for ambulance workers and 13% for nursing and healthcare assistants (CQC).
2. Workload and stress
Stress and high workloads lead to emotional and physical exhaustion and burnout. In the US, research from the American Medical Association (AMA) has shown that work overload in healthcare triples the risk of burnout, compromising patient safety and driving higher staff turnover. The same study revealed that half of all survey respondents met the criteria for burnout and that just under a quarter (24.3%) of physicians intended to quit their jobs within two years.
3. Administrative burden
Most emergency response employees enter the profession because they want to help and care for people. However, the complexity of modern healthcare systems places a significant administrative burden on workers, many of whom feel as though the considerable amount of paperwork and form-filling they do detracts from the care they can provide. While effective administration is crucial, it is important to recognise that administrative requirements and responsibilities can be greatly simplified and streamlined through technology.
4. Work-life balance
When healthcare systems are stretched to the limits, employees tend to pick up the slack and take on additional responsibilities. More overtime, longer shifts and less rest eventually infringe on work-life balance, affecting employees’ abilities to live fulfilling lives outside the workplace. In turn, this contributes to disillusionment, low morale and high turnover.
Staff retention strategies in healthcare – where to start?
Improving employee retention in healthcare and reducing turnover starts by identifying organisation-specific issues and concerns. While seeking direct feedback from staff is beneficial, data analytics are central to this process.
Organisations must use their internal data to better understand the profile of their workforce and identify problem areas. Is retention an organisation-wide issue or confined to certain roles, groups or departments? Is turnover higher among new recruits, those approaching the end of their career or mid-career employees looking to make a change? What reasons do these employees give for wanting to leave? What strains and tensions impact the workforce?
Staff retention in healthcare initiatives
Once organisations understand the unique challenges they and their workforces face, they can begin to implement staff retention initiatives. These must be context-specific and adapted to each organisation’s situation.
1. Optimise working conditions
Balancing patient safety and employee well-being is a delicate challenge. Providing nurses with more breaks or ensuring paramedics end their shifts on time can negatively impact healthcare outcomes in work environments that are short-staffed and under strain. However, it is critical if organisations are to prevent burnout, improve morale and tackle high staff turnover.
Omda Readiness is a cutting-edge modelling solution for emergency response organisations. It enables emergency service providers to simulate scenarios in a virtual environment before implementation in the live environment. Recently, it has been used to model the impact of adjusting end-of-shift and break policies for overstretched paramedics at the Welsh Ambulance Services NHS Trust (WAST). By modelling various options and measuring the effect on service performance, WAST was able to successfully improve on-shift conditions for employees while balancing patient safety concerns. It is an excellent example of the role digital solutions can play in improving staff retention.
You can read more about this in our WAST customer case story.
2. Make technology work for employees
Technology also plays an important part in other areas of service provision. Most notably, reducing the administrative burden employees face. User-focused digital solutions can streamline core workflows, making data collection and input significantly easier, reducing the amount of duplicate documentation required, and enabling emergency professionals to focus on patient care.
Omda Response is a prime example. A mobile solution for ambulances and rescue vehicles, it includes navigation and response management components. However, in this context, it is the Electronic Medical Record (EMR) component that is most relevant. The EMR component provides paramedics with up-to-date guidance on medical workflows and facilitates intuitive and efficient documentation of any medical care paramedics provide. Through comprehensive workflow support, structured data input and dynamic checklists, it reduces the administrative burden on emergency responders and helps them deliver the best care possible.
3. Foreground well-being
If emergency response organisations are to reduce staff turnover, they must promote a workplace culture that emphasises employee well-being. This means transforming mental and physical health from a concept at the periphery of organisations – something considered a secondary goal and takes a back seat to more pressing operational challenges – into a concept that sits at the heart of organisational culture and informs everything a service provider does.
High staff turnover impacts performance, patient outcomes and overall service expenditure, and in the long run can be extremely costly. There is no one-size-fits-all solution for employee well-being. Each organisation will need to formulate a unique strategy. That said, a good place to start is by requesting employee feedback and attempting to tackle the issues that have the most pronounced impact.
4. Focusing on new recruits and late-career support
If emergency service providers can offer career development opportunities for those working in emergency response, the focus then switches to supporting employees at either end of their emergency careers. Improving support for new recruits is arguably the best way of laying healthy foundations for the future of emergency services. It enables organisations to implement healthy working practices from the first moment and foster a work culture and environment that encourages loyalty and improves retention.
At the other end of the spectrum, support for those nearing the end of their careers may want to use their experience to lead or support colleagues in a less intensive role. By supporting these individuals, emergency service providers extend their service and reduce turnover while taking full advantage of long-standing employees’ expertise.
Increasing employee engagement in the healthcare sector
Emergency response and healthcare organisations are supporting these staff retention strategies with excellent work on increasing employee engagement. Here, we highlight four ways in which they are doing so.
1. Improved communication
Healthcare providers are implementing engagement initiatives that facilitate better communication between staff and management by creating more opportunities for employees to express themselves constructively. Understanding what motivates staff and how their current situation could be improved, makes them feel valued and provides insight into issues management may otherwise be unaware of.
2. Act on employee feedback
Emergency response organisations are also making concerted efforts to act on the feedback and communication they receive from employees. When staff know their input results in real change, they feel listened to, improving engagement.
3.Recognise success
Recent research suggests that recognition of staff success can increase productivity by up to 14% and reduce turnover by 31%, resulting in a much more stable work environment (Forbes). With this in mind, healthcare providers now place greater emphasis on commending employee success.
4. Halting the rise of “quiet quitting”
While high staff turnover is the main priority, emergency service providers are also alert to the “quiet quitting” phenomenon. Quiet quitting occurs when employees disengage from their jobs and either continue in the role in an uncommitted and unproductive manner, or eventually leave with little or no notice. This increases the burden on other healthcare professionals, affecting their morale, productivity and performance. To counteract it, healthcare providers are targeting relevant employees with re-engagement efforts sooner.
Staff retention and Omda Emergency solutions
While we have primarily focused on the emergency response sector in this article, the concepts and guidance apply to the wider healthcare sector. Staff retention is one of the most pressing issues facing modern emergency services and healthcare providers. While improved compensation is a primary concern, there are other steps organisations can take to reduce turnover.
First and foremost, user-focused digital solutions that empower frontline employees, facilitate optimised resource use, and support improved funding arrangements are crucial. They are the foundation on which organisations will build more modern, efficient and streamlined emergency response and healthcare services. They enable organisations to do more with less, helping them to operate within tight budgetary limits while improving service provision.
Emphasising healthcare employee engagement and well-being is also essential. All too often, employees are expected to take the strain and are pushed to breaking point, resulting in burnout. In many cases, this is not the fault of service providers themselves. Instead, it is the product of underfunded healthcare systems in which overworked employees perform roles that often determine whether someone lives or dies. Whatever the cause, the situation must change, and effective digital solutions can play a part in this.
Finally, organisations must also ensure healthcare workers have opportunities for development within their chosen profession and pathways are developed to facilitate progression.
While staff retention is a critical concern in the emergency response and healthcare sectors, there are steps providers can take to ease the problem and begin reversing the high turnover trend. At Omda, we believe our advanced digital solutions will form a major component in staff retention strategies going forward.
