As we covered in our last blog, preventing physician fatigue needs to be a major priority for every medical practice. When providers are under constant pressure to perform, not only are they at risk of developing stress-related health issues, but employees and patients can also suffer increased stress and dissatisfaction. Thankfully, there are a number of strategies currently being used by many medical practices to get to work preventing physician fatigue.

How Your Practice Can Work to Prevent Physician Fatigue

1. Make wellness for your employees a top priority at your medical practice. Remember that physician burnout isn’t just a problem for the doctors experiencing it, but also the patients and employees who may bear the brunt of it.
2. Create a wellness position at your practice or a collaborative committee. Your wellness chairperson or champion should be someone who can help to survey employees for burnout and troubleshoot initiatives to prevent physician fatigue. These employees can also work to make employees aware of all of the wellness resources available and model positive anti-burnout activities, like leaving the office on time or stopping during lunch for a short meditation session.
3. Survey your employees on a yearly basis to see what employees are doing to keep themselves in good physical, mental and emotional health. Use the results to identify potential workplace wellness initiatives and get a look at where your medical practice is succeeding and where you could stand to improve.
4. This might seem obvious, but if you complete a workplace wellness survey, you should also use the results to make positive changes in your workplace. Whether it’s redesigning the way that daily workflow occurs or developing new and better ways for employees to communicate, these changes will show employees that you are listening and that you care about their experience enough to change.
5. Once you have made some changes, you should repeat the survey to see how things have changed. Are you doing your job when it comes to preventing physician fatigue? Checking back in allows you to also see if there are new areas where you could stand to improve.
6. Don’t call out employees or embarrass anyone in the office with survey findings. Instead, you should be supportive and continue to emphasize improvement. Just like physician fatigue doesn’t happen overnight, counteracting burnout doesn’t happen in one day either. 

Preventing Physician Fatigue with Vetters Enterprises

Vetters Enterprises specializes in practice management, private practice business support and revenue cycle optimization. We can perform in-depth assessments of your practice or facility and identify potential issues. Let us keep your business as healthy as you keep your patients! Give us a call at (443) 352-0088.