Synergetics
Health News Service
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Hospitals are being revitalized with HeartMath A successful program showing measurable results and dramatic changes in staff retention and patient satisfaction San Jose, California: While some hospitals are playing bidding wars for registered nurses, other hospitals are evaluating how they can increase employee retention and reinvent their reputation for being a high-quality health care organization. |
Delnor-Community Hospital, outside Chicago, is such a hospital. They've re-invented their hospital by making their employees and patients their top priority and as a result theyve realized $800,000 in annualized savings due to their first-year turnover reduction. Measurables from staff retention to staff satisfaction and patient satisfaction have dramatically improved for Delnor over the past two years.
Employee turnover can easily reach 25-30% per year t and the average cost to recruit and train one employee is estimated at 30% of an employees salary. Quality health care includes customer-patient satisfaction and that is affected by employee satisfaction. At Delnor, they reinvented their hospital by implementing several initiatives. They knew that more care for employees and customer-patients was essential - so they brought in a unique program designed by HeartMath LLC that is defined as the only scientifically-validated system of stress interventions and performance enhancements.
Delnor chose to implement HeartMaths Staff Retention and Development Program. They felt an emphasis on employee retention would help and it did. Delnor achieved dramatic results, reducing turnover from 28% to 21% over the entire hospital and an impressive 5.9% in the HeartMath-trained group in just one year. At the same time, they also saw patient satisfaction increase from the 73rd percentile to the 93rd percentile, according to the Parkside Survey national database.
The investment Delnor made in staff retention has been hugely successful. The hospital realized $800,000 in annualized savings due to their first-year turnover reduction. Second year turnover, eight months into the fiscal year, is even more impressive, dropping to 14% hospital wide, with HeartMath-trained group coming in at only 1.2%. An additional estimated savings of $800,000 is anticipated.
Tom Wright, COO of Delnor-Community Hospital says, "Shifts like what we saw in our staff and what other hospitals are seeing from HeartMaths program can mean the difference between losing one or two employees to losing a dozen or more employees. From a business perspective thats a difference of thousands of dollars in new recruitment costs. From a personal perspective, you just dont want to see valuable people leave."
The HeartMath organization is recognized internationally as one of the most effective and fastest growing organizational transformation systems in the world today. Many HeartMath studies have been published in peer-reviewed journals including the American Journal of Cardiology, Journal of Advancement in Medicine, Proceedings of the Eleventh International Congress on Stress, Integrative Physiological and Behavioral Science and Complementary Therapies in Medicine.
All HeartMath programs are based on this research. Numerous organizational case studies have been completed in North America and Europe. HeartMath clients include three of the nations top ten healthcare providers and dozens of health care clients including Kaiser Permanente, Stanford University Medical Center, Aetna, GlaxoSmithKline, Royal Ottawa Medical Center, Memorial Hospital (South Bend, IN) and leading corporations such as Shell, BP, Unilever, Boeing and Hewlett Packard.
