Hospitals are being revitalized with HeartMath® A successful program showing measurable results and dramatic changes in staff retention and patient satisfaction

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 has re-invented their hospital as a result, everything from staff retention to staff satisfaction to patient satisfaction has soared over the past two years.

Contact: Gabriella Boehmer
(831) 338-8710 or email: gboehmer@heartmath.com

Hospitals are being revitalized with HeartMath®
A successful program showing measurable results and dramatic changes in
staff retention and patient satisfaction

As baby-boomers approach the age group when quality medical care is becoming a necessity, were also in the worst nursing shortage since the late 1980s. One out of every ten hospital nursing positions is vacant this year and burnout is among the high-ranking reasons for this devastating and costly surge of nurse turnover. 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. Such a hospital is Delnor-Community Hospital outside Chicago. They have re-invented their hospital by making their employees and patients their priority, and as a result, everything from staff retention to staff satisfaction to patient satisfaction has soared over the past two years.

Employee burnout has many contributing factors, from unreasonably high workloads to time pressures to poor staffing. Diane Ball, formerly manager of Cardiac Rehab and currently full time Certified HeartMath® Trainer of Delnor says, "Consider the difference in performance in a happy employee who has been asked give 110% on the job, and a frustrated, burned out employee whos being asked to give 110%. Poor staffing and heavy workloads can certainly add stress, but the road to burnout is much shorter when employees dont feel cared for and communication is compromised."

Add to this situation the nationwide nursing shortage, which is even hospitals to postpone non-emergency surgeries, turn away ambulances and fill in with temporary staff. But, its not just nurses who are quitting. Radiology technologists, respiratory therapists and nursing assistants are all showing signs of a severe to moderate shortage. More and more physicians are even unplugging from a system many feel compromises their medical integrity, putting cost control above patient care. At a time when employee turnover can easily reach 25-30% per year, health care organizations are realizing they can not afford to make employee retention anything less than a top priority.

Hospitals depend on patient preference, as patients today are more aware and more selective in how to spend their health care dollars. More than ever, consumers are demanding quality healthcare, and it has become clear that quality health care includes customer-patient satisfaction and that is affected by employee satisfaction. While Delnor put an emphasis on employee retention -- reducing turnover from 28% to 21% over the entire hospital and an impressive 5.9% in the HeartMath trained group in just one year, they also saw customer-patient satisfaction increase from the 73rd percentile to the 93rd percentile, according to the Parkside Survey national database, all in the same year.

When employee turnover is high the cascading financial drain quickly erodes the bottom-line of an organization. The average cost to recruit and train one employee is estimated at 30% of an employees salary. At Delnor, they addressed the problem by implementing several initiatives. They knew more care for employees and customer-patients was essential - so they included a program that is defined as the only scientifically validated system of stress interventions and performance enhancements.

The program was developed by HeartMath LLC, an innovative -human performance training and technology company in Boulder Creek, California, and is based on more than a decade of scientific research. HeartMaths work uniquely reveals the stress-performance relationship, showing both the debilitating effects of mental, emotional and physical stress as well as how to enhance performance and intelligence while reducing stress. In previous years, a program featuring stress reduction and performance enhancement was not seen as a strategic priority for Delnor-Community. After close examination of their challenges with staff retention and seeing first hand the sound basis of the HeartMath programs and the successes of previous client outcomes, they decided to implement the HeartMath Staff Retention Program.

The investment Delnor-Community made towards staff retention has been hugely successful. The hospital calculated $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 staff coming in at only 1.2%. An additional estimated savings of $800,000.

Charles Inlander, a leading consumer health advocate and founder of the Peoples Medical Society says, "Given the extreme shortage of nursing professionals, hospitals cant afford to let burnout be a contributing factor of employee turnover. Especially not when burnout can be minimized. Delnor-Community is a great example -- being proactive and strategic, they created a better atmosphere for their employees. This action shows respect, understanding and appreciation, and that communicates to employees that their employer does care about them. Thats good for the people and its also good strategy."

Other hospitals are also taking similar proactive steps towards staff retention. For instance, Saint Lukes/Shawnee Mission Hospital in Kansas City, Missouri, has been experiencing rapid change and expansion, a breeding ground for burnout. The nurses leadership team recognized the need to address the additional stress being put upon their nurses during this time of change.

Saint Lukes/Shawnee Mission brought in HeartMath to help ease the shock wave of crucial system changes. The program helped make dramatic shifts in their nursing staff. Prior to the program, at least 39% admitted to feeling exhausted and 57% felt frustrated. The program gave them a tangible approach to deal with the stress caused by the hospital changes. The feelings of exhaustion fell to only 13%, while the frustration levels dropped to only 17%. The tension felt between management and staff dropped from 39% prior to the program to 17% afterwards. Tom Wright, COO of Delnor-Community Hospital says, "Shifts like what we saw in our staff and what other hospitals are seeing from this program can mean the difference between losing one or two employees or losing half a dozen or more employees. From a business perspective thats a difference of thousands of dollars in new recruitment cost. 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. For more than a decade its sister organization, the nonprofit Institute of HeartMath, has conducted leading-edge medical research on the link between emotions, stress and performance, as well as ground-breaking organizational research on the impact of human performance training on key organizational outcomes.

Many HeartMath studies have been published in peer-reviewed journals including 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 and numerous organizational case studies have been completed in North America and Europe. HeartMath clients include three of the nations top 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, Indiana) and leading global corporations such as Shell, BP, Unilever, Boeing and Hewlett Packard.

To learn more about HeartMath go to their web site at http://www.heartmath.com or call them at 800-450-9111.

HeartMath experts suggest organizations build in qualities that support retention.
For example: