Administrative staff burnout affects the patient experience

Healthcare is in a transitionary phase. Once more, the healthcare industry is turning towards empathy and compassion in terms of care towards patients. But in order to provide better healthcare experiences, organizations need to start taking better care of their employees as well.

Introduction

Patient experience is the biggest factor that today determines the success of a healthcare business or its failure. But while many healthcare providers bemoan relying on such ‘unscientific’ and ‘arbitrary’ methods to determine the quality of healthcare being provided, the healthcare industry has changed. Today’s healthcare models are patient-centric instead of institutional-centric.

With that said, healthcare institutions are only slowly figuring out the ways that they can improve patient experiences. While a lot of it depends on how and what you are presenting to your patients, healthcare businesses often don’t realize that their own business practices and models can have a significant impact on the patient experience.

That’s why ensuring that your patients have the best possible experience when interacting with touch points in your healthcare business is important. From your facility’s cleanliness to waiting times to how your nurses and healthcare providers act with patients, all of these factors need to be improved to give great patient experiences. But one thing that often goes under the radar is how administrative staff is interacting with patients.

While touchpoints with administrative staff are important, many healthcare organizations don’t realize that there is a hidden danger that must be on the lookout for. This danger can cripple healthcare organizations’ admin staff and seriously impact morale for the rest of the staff and even patient experiences. We are, of course, going to talk about burnout.

What is burnout?

Burnout refers to a state of mind where an individual suffers from near-constant physical and mental exhaustion. While it is not an official diagnosis, most mental health experts do agree that burnout typically is the emergence of a myriad set of diseases and symptoms. These issues typically result in lowered productivity, job satisfaction, and happiness is a type of work-stress-related problem.

While there are many factors, including personality traits, family life, and other influences, that can determine whether an individual is at risk of suffering from burnout or not.

But it is really the conditions at work like workplace dynamics, extreme level of job activity (either extremely monotonous or extremely chaotic), unclear job expectations, inability to influence decisions at the workplace, and, most importantly of all, work-life balance that determine whether an individual is likely to suffer from worker burnout.

Long working hours with frequent changes in schedules, few leaves, and long stretches of constant work are one of the biggest factors that cause worker burnout.

As would be intuitive, it is white and blue-collar workers that have the highest likelihood of suffering from burnout as a result of poor work-life balance.

Consequences of Burnout

Burnout is not just a case of workers being ‘lazy’, tired or uninterested. Burnout is a chronic state which can result in poor health in workers. This in turn can cause severe reductions in productivity as well as unnecessarily high attrition in organizations.

In terms of health risks, researchers have found that burnout typically causes a higher risk of developing insomnia, heart disease, Type 2 diabetes, and lowered immunity.

Along with these non-communicable diseases, burnout also causes fatigue, substance abuse, and increased disposition for mental health conditions related to sadness, anger, irritability, and excessive stress.

As a result of these conditions, not only are workers reducing their quality of health but businesses are also losing effective work hours. With lowered productivity, companies can lose a significant portion of their business activity potential. But since burnout often is related to factors that are usually pervasive in the entirety of the workplace, burnout is usually found in more than one employee in an organization.

Healthcare Burnout

With greater awareness about what proper work-life balance looks like, the world is more aware of burnout. But despite this heightened awareness about the ill effects of burnout, it remains very rarely talked about. While many healthcare providers have now started talking about the mental health issues that are prevalent in the industry, including burnout, many healthcare businesses pay no heed to this.

However, as we’ve seen burnout has several detrimental effects on not just the individuals suffering from it but also their organizations. It is for this reason that all businesses including those in the healthcare industry place a greater emphasis on the mental well-being of their employees.

But in the healthcare industry, one group of workers has just as many risks of burnout but is often overlooked completely in the context of better mental health of employees. These are the many millions of employees that are employed as members of administrative staff in the healthcare industry.

While one would imagine that burnout among administrative staff only occurs in large healthcare organizations, nothing could be further from the truth. Poor work-life balance workloads on administrative staff can be found in both, large healthcare organizations as well as smaller group medical practices. In many cases, it is the smaller group medical practices where there is a higher risk of burnout due to only one or two employees handling the entire administrative workload for the entire practice.

Burnout amongst administrative staff in healthcare organizations can be triply damaging. Firstly, just like all other cases of burnout, administrative staff have a much lower output and damage their own health as a result of burnout.

But since the healthcare industry is a customer-facing industry, administrative staff also functions as one of the more important touchpoints that patients interact with. Due to burnout, administrative staff may be providing poor patient experiences with no fault or awareness. In this day and age, all healthcare providers and businesses should at least have a vague idea about the importance of providing great patient experiences to succeed in the healthcare industry. Patient experiences are the foundational factor that determines patient satisfaction levels, which then go on to influence how a healthcare organization is ranked nationally, the rates that it is able to negotiate with third-party payers and insurance networks, and how much federal reimbursement they receive under various programs.

Improved patient experience also influences other business factors like patient lifetime value, retention, and acquisition rate. Improved patient experiences also play a huge role in building brand authority, brand loyalty, trust among patients, the attrition rate for staff, staff morale, and even patient treatment outcomes. The importance of providing improved patient experiences to patients cannot be overstated.

How to prevent burnout

Thankfully, preventing burnout is much easier than trying to fix it after it has already happened. The first key to preventing burnout is to undertake sensitization and awareness programs for your workforce. The earlier an employee is able to identify that they are on the verge of burnout or are already suffering from burnout, the easier it becomes to help them out of that mental space.

After proper awareness, it is important for healthcare organizations to remove the workplace factors that can lead to burnout. While removing all such factors is often not possible for most organizations, reducing these factors to as low as possible is the best way to prevent the emergence of burnout.

Specifically, reducing overworking and ensuring that administrative staff has manageable workloads is important. But in the case of most healthcare practices, hiring multiple administrative staff is not possible due to financial constraints. In such cases, modern technology can help. With the help of automated systems and platforms, even a single administrator can do the work of multiple staff members without suffering from any excessive workloads.

Proactive measures to improve the physical and mental health of administrative staff can also help reduce the risk of burnout. Of course, all of the above advice is equally applicable to medical staff in a healthcare organization who are at just as much risk of suffering from burnout.

Improving patient customer service

In terms of actionable advice, in order to provide great patient customer service in healthcare organizations, careful monitoring of employee mental and physical wellness must be done. Making healthcare organizations places where employees are fulfilled, respected, and find healthy work-life balance is important for providing improved patient experiences as well as better healthcare outcomes.

But that is easier said than done. Just like the healthcare industry is working towards being more empathetic towards patients, it also must work towards being more empathetic to the millions that work inside the healthcare system. Only with the use of modern technology and processes, can we reduce burnout and thus, improve the patient experience.

Conclusion

Burnout is no longer a whispered secret that healthcare organizations can afford to ignore. Burnout not only adversely affects your employees but can also have devastating consequences for your healthcare organization. With lowered patient experiences, caused by burnt-out staff, your healthcare organization can lose out to competitors. That’s why healthcare organizations today need to keep an eye out for burnout among administrative staff, not just for the benefit of their employees but also for the health of their business.

Patient experience today is the primary metric that sets healthcare businesses apart from their competitors. Without providing excellent patient experiences, no healthcare business can succeed.

That’s why healthcare businesses need to start to consider their businesses from a holistic viewpoint with empathy always in mind. This allows them to not only provide better patient experiences but also take care of their employees.

BraveLabs helps healthcare practices implement modern technology that helps them reduce administrative workload, prevent burnout and deliver great patient experiences.