Tag: burnout

Tackling Healthcare Staff Burnout: Why Agency Partnerships Matter

The healthcare field is ever-changing, and the challenge of staff stress and burnout has become a pressing issue. According to the American Psychological Association, stress levels have risen across all demographics, with certain groups experiencing a 15% increase. A staggering quarter of the U.S. population is grappling with stress, and healthcare professionals bear a significant portion of this burden.

Feeling undervalued and overwhelmed at work is a major factor contributing to burnout, whether you’re a permanent employee or on a temporary assignment.

In this environment, partnerships between healthcare facilities and reputable agencies are critical in combatting burnout and its associated stresses. These partnerships benefit healthcare workers and contribute to the overall health of the organization and the communities they serve.

Here’s why agency partnerships play a vital role:

  • Staffing Stability and Flexibility: Healthcare facilities often need personnel for short periods of time, like covering a nurse on maternity leave. With an agency partnership an interim solution is possible which ensures that the facility maintains staffing levels without straining their permanent workforce.
  • Relieving Overburdened Teams: By supplementing in-house teams with agency personnel, facilities can distribute work more evenly, preventing perpetual overwhelm and boosting morale.
  • Supporting Travel Opportunities: Most facilities are reluctant to see a nurse leave to take a travel assignment, but these experiences can be career-enhancing. Handled properly nurses may return to staff positions with enriched skills.
  • Enhancing Safe Patient Care: All of us share a common goal and that is doing our best for the patients we serve. Agency partnerships uphold patient standards by preventing staff from becoming overstretched, leading to improved patient outcomes.

Partnering with a staffing agency gives healthcare facilities access to skilled professionals who can be seamlessly integrated into their team when the need is there.

In conclusion, combatting stress and burnout in healthcare requires proactive measures. Collaborative partnerships between healthcare facilities and agencies offer ongoing solutions by promoting staff well-being, improving patient care, and strengthening our healthcare system. Embracing these partnerships paves the way for a healthier, more effective healthcare environment.

Change the Path You Are On

We all read and hear that there is a shortage of healthcare workers in our workforce and the numbers leaving seem to be climbing daily. We talk about mental health, patient to provider ratios, heath system politics, and all the reasons why people are choosing to leave healthcare.

With so many healthcare workers investing so much time and money in their career path, it seems unfathomable to see them leave healthcare all together.

Perhaps there is another path to consider that would allow you to fall in love with your healthcare career again. Would you like to:

  • Meet new people
  • Serve a community that is in need of someone with your professional skills
  • Work for an employer whose mission is to MAKE YOU HAPPY and find assignments that work for you
  • Develop personally and professionally
  • Enjoy work while finding balance in your work time vs time off

These are just a few ways to change your path or course of action to avoid burnout and frustration. Leaving a facility to work for a reputable travel healthcare agency is not a “risky” decision or just for the young, single, no kids, individual.

A successful healthcare agency, along with an experienced recruitment team, can work with most healthcare professionals and match them up with assignments that work for their individual circumstances.

In the end, a healthcare professional has nothing to lose in changing their path from staff work with corporate policies, to local or national travel healthcare. The following steps need to be taken:

✔ Always send an appropriate notice in writing with a minimum of two weeks notice. Notice should be sent to the direct supervisor and HR representative.

✔ Always remain professional and diligent in the remaining days you work and prepare to leave regardless of the reasons you are leaving.

✔ Request letters of recommendation from any members of the leadership you have worked with.

Leaving on professional terms will almost certainly ensure your ability to return to that facility should you find the need to go back down the road. But many travelers leave staff work and remain traveling until they retire. Others may travel for a while, return to their “home” base facility for a while and then return to travel. Again, they are back and forth as it suits their needs.

In the rare instance a healthcare professional finds travel is just not for them, they always have the option to go back to their home base or find another facility to work as staff or truly leave healthcare all together.

You do owe it to yourself and your career to change course and explore all options before choosing to leave all together.

Why wait, let us help YOU CHANGE the PATH you are on NOW!

For Your Mental Health Resources

Speak Up™ For Your Mental Health is a new patient safety campaign from The Joint Commission offering free materials for healthcare workers to download and provide to patients and their families. This campaign includes:

  • An animated video, in both English and Spanish
  • Infographics, in both English and Spanish
  • A Speak Up™ User’s Guide on how and to whom organizations can distribute materials

Click here to access all the resources.

The Join Commission advises that mental health is just as important as someone’s physical health. Depression and other mental health issues are common, and like physical illnesses they need to be treated.

Speak Up™ For Your Mental Health, a patient safety campaign from The Joint Commission, is designed to educate patients on how to advocate for themselves and their mental health.

Healthcare Burnout: Advice from Liz Pollack Part 4

As part of our series on healthcare burnout, certified executive and personal life coach, Liz Pollack, shares things you can do if you are experiencing burnout now.

Our special series with Liz includes:

– Part 1: Learn more about burnout and take an assessment
– Part 2: Learn to recognize the signs of burnout
– Part 3: Learn techniques to avoid conflict when dealing with burnout

Watch those videos and get the free resources (burnout assessment and conflict styles inventory) – just click on the link for each part above.

Liz is a Certified Executive and Personal Life Coach, Grief Counselor, and Pet Loss Grief Counselor. She can help you learn to cope in many ways – work, home, grief, relationships, etc.

She is available at 309.370.4492 or email: legup@mtco.com

Healthcare Burnout: Advice from Liz Pollack Part 3

As part of our series on healthcare burnout, certified executive and personal life coach, Liz Pollack, shares techniques on how to deal with difficult people in the workplace.

Click to download the Conflict Inventory resource from Liz

We want to thank Liz Pollack for not only sharing this resource but also for
her expertise as we work through this video series.

Liz is a Certified Executive and Personal Life Coach, Grief Counselor, and Pet Loss Grief Counselor. She can help you learn to cope in many ways – work, home, grief, relationships, etc.

She is available at 309.370.4492 or email: legup@mtco.com