Here’s Why Your Healthcare Team is Exhausted and What You Can Do About It

No matter how skilled and efficient experts are with their jobs, healthcare workers are still humans who get tired and burned out at the end of the day. Stress and lack of rest can affect their performance and morale in the workplace resulting in low productivity, decreased patient satisfaction, and replacement costs. All of these can hurt your business if gone unaddressed.

The blog provides practical tips on how to avoid burnout and healthcare fatigue.

Why are they exhausted?

To alleviate this problem, you need to first determine the factors that make your healthcare team exhausted to know what areas need to be improved on and to better support your workers. Generally, the high workload in healthcare is one of the main reasons why health workers are tired. In a study on the relationship of workload, burnout, and job control, it is found that “an increase in the workload was significantly associated with higher job exhaustion.”

A recent report from the CIPD and Simplyhealth also listed workloads as one of the top three causes of stress-related absence in the workplace together with management style and relationships at work.

High workloads can be attributed to the shortage of trained staff due to the unequal demand and supply for different healthcare professionals nowadays, and the multifunctional nature of healthcare professionals which allows them to take on several roles within their practice, adding to their workload and even leading them to compromise other core responsibilities.

With more tasks on their plate, healthcare professionals resort to extended working hours, missing out on adequate rest and work-life balance. Eventually, this will lead not only to exhaustion but to low morale among the employees as well.

What can you do about it?

Just like any other workplace, communication is important in healthcare. Assure your employees that you are open to listening to them when it comes to issues and concerns in the workplace. By doing this, you can also have an insight into things you need to look into when it comes to employee management and such. Recognizing achievements and rewarding good performance are also things you can do to make them feel appreciated for their efforts and will most likely drive them to do their best at work.

More importantly, you need to find ways to effectively manage the workload in your healthcare business so that you avoid getting your staff overworked. These two surefire ways can be the solution you need:

1. Employing telehealth in your operations

The field of telehealth empowers how patients, doctors, nurses, and other healthcare professionals experience healthcare. Regardless of the service needed—whether a doctor’s consultation or prescription—patients conveniently access these through smart devices such as laptops and smartphones. The physical distance is crossed with the quick, real-time access of a virtual one.

Among its many benefits is the flexibility in scheduling, which helps in workload management. Since telehealth can be used virtually anywhere and anytime, healthcare professionals have more freedom in their schedule and can balance their workload for the week, for example, by offering extended hours or even weekend operations without requiring the physical office to be staffed. With this set-up, work-life balance among workers can also be attained or improved.

You can look into expanding your healthcare staff by employing RCM experts as part of your Telehealth operations. Outsourcing a great RCM team can do wonders for your business. It allows you to focus more on caring for patients, increases revenues, and is cost-efficient. More importantly, it lightens the load of administrative tasks which contributes to managing the overall workload in your healthcare facility.

2. Hiring back-up support

When all else fails, it’s never wrong to add more people to your team if it means getting the job done without sacrificing the well-being of your employees and patients. Outsourcing your healthcare workers and even telemedicine services as back-up support is one the best ways to manage workloads without breaking the bank when compared to simply hiring staff members.

Through a trusted healthcare solutions partner, you would be able to build a dedicated team of well-trained healthcare practitioners & RCM professionals specifically designed for your unique needs. Your company can also save up to 70% on operation costs by employing an outsourced team and guarantee excellent work quality and performance on the job.

The right partner also has speed to market hiring process of 30 to 45 days from hiring to onboarding, your hospital staff can focus on their core function to provide care and treatment while your outsourced backup support team takes on operational responsibilities.

Let’s work together to build a great, high-performing RCM Team!

Infinit-O is the trusted customer-centric and sustainable leader in Business Process Optimization to Small and Medium businesses in the Financial Services, Healthcare and Technology sectors by delivering continuous improvement through technology, data and people.