Managing office staffing and handling time-off requests effectively is key to maintaining smooth operations, avoiding staff burnout, and ensuring good patient care. 

Having difficult conversations with patients and their family is one of the most challenging yet important responsibilities in healthcare. These conversations can involve topics like delivering bad news, discussing prognosis, setting boundaries, addressing non-compliance, or managing unrealistic expectations.

Here are some steps you can implement to optimize difficult conversations you need to have with your patient.

While most healthcare providers are compassionate and want to provide optimal care to their patients, implicit biases exist. Healthcare providers may not be aware of implicit biases, which may be subtle and unintentional, that can influence clinical interactions, lead to a lack of trust between the patient and the healthcare provider, and result in healthcare disparities.

You strive to provide quality care and good customer service to your patients. But inevitably, you will have a patient or patient’s family member that is not satisfied with the care you (or your staff) provided.

Physician burnout is a long-term stress reaction characterized by emotional exhaustion, depersonalization (indifference toward or detachment from work), and a decreased sense of personal achievement. Physicians are especially prone to burnout with almost half of physicians reporting at least one symptom of burnout.

Causes and Effects of Burnout
Physician burnout not only negatively affects physicians and their families, but it also puts patients at risk. Evidence suggests that physician burnout worsens the quality of patient care, increases the risk of medical errors, and decreases patient satisfaction.

Excessive workload, high patient volumes, administrative and regulatory burdens, increased documentation requirements, limited control over work schedules, and lack of support and autonomy from their organizations have been shown to increase physician stress levels and lead to a lack of work-life balance, emotional exhaustion, and poor relationships with colleagues and patients. This all creates burnout.

Steps You Can Take to Prevent Burnout
Here are some steps you can take at your practice to help reduce stress and prevent burnout:

All healthcare professionals like to receive positive online reviews. It’s a great way to let people know about you and the exceptional care you provide. Which, in turn, can help send new patients your way. 

To have a thriving practice, you must have patients. While it is great to get new patients, it is important to focus on retaining established patients, too. If you create loyal patients, they not only return to your office for appointments, but they promote your practice to their friends and family which is great for business.

The Need for Fairness in Healthcare
In a perfect world, healthcare access and provision would be fair for all people, regardless of ethnicity, race, religion, gender, socioeconomic status, geographic location, language, age, disability, and other variables. Unfortunately, this is not always the case. To help address disparities in healthcare and improve patient outcomes, here is some guidance for practicing patient-centered and culturally competent healthcare. 

You may have staffed your practice with well-qualified people, but now they need proper training to understand your practice and its culture, their role within your practice, your policies and procedures, patient population, state and federal requirements such as HIPAA and OSHA, and other office practices. (If you need help with hiring, read our blog article, “Hiring the Best Staff for Your Practice”!)

A patient suffers cardiac arrest while waiting in the exam room. An elderly visitor falls in the waiting room, is complaining of leg pain and is unable to get up. A diabetic staff member passes out from hypoglycemia. These are just a few examples of unexpected medical emergencies that could happen in a medical office.