Hospitals are Being Revitalized with HeartMath

A successful program showing measurable results and dramatic changes in staff retention and patient satisfaction

San Jose, California -- 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 organisation. Delnor-Community Hospital, outside Chicago, is such a hospital. They've re-invented their hospital by making their employees and patients their top priority and as a result they've realized $800,000 in annualised savings due to their first-year turnover reduction. Measurables from staff retention to staff satisfaction and patient satisfaction have dramatically improved for Delnor over the past two years.

When employee turnover is high the cascading financial drain quickly erodes the bottom-line of an organisation. Employee turnover can easily reach 25-30% per year -- and the average cost to recruit and train one employee is estimated at 30% of an employee's salary. Quality health care includes customer-patient satisfaction and that is affected by employee satisfaction. At Delnor, they reinvented their hospital by implementing several initiatives. They knew that more care for employees and customer-patients was essential - so they brought in a unique program designed by HeartMath LLC that is defined as the only scientifically-validated system of stress interventions and performance enhancements.

HeartMath LLC, is an innovative human performance training and technology company near Silicon Valley in California, and is based on more than a decade of scientific research. (www.heartmath.com) HeartMath's 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.

Delnor chose to implement HeartMath's Staff Retention and Development Program. They felt an emphasis on employee retention would help and it did. Delnor achieved dramatic results, reducing turnover from 28% to 21% over the entire hospital and an impressive 5.9% in the HeartMath-trained group in just one year. At the same time, they also saw patient satisfaction increase from the 73rd percentile to the 93rd percentile, according to the Parkside Survey national database.

The investment Delnor made in staff retention has been hugely successful. The hospital realized $800,000 in annualised 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 group coming in at only 1.2%. An additional estimated savings of $800,000 is anticipated.

Charles Inlander, a leading consumer health advocate and founder of the People's Medical Society says, "Given the extreme shortage of nursing professionals, hospitals can't afford to let burnout be a contributing factor of employee turnover. Especially not when burnout can be minimised. Delnor is a great example. Being proactive and strategic, they created a better atmosphere for their employees. This communicates to employees that their employer does care about them. That's good for the people and it's also good strategy."

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

Saint Luke's/Shawnee Mission brought in HeartMath and 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 13%, while the frustration levels dropped to 17%. The tension felt between management and staff dropped from 39% to 17%.

Tom Wright, COO of Delnor-Community Hospital says, "Shifts like what we saw in our staff and what other hospitals are seeing from HeartMath's program can mean the difference between losing one or two employees to losing a dozen or more employees. From a business perspective that's a difference of thousands of dollars in new recruitment costs. From a personal perspective, you just don't want to see valuable people leave."

The HeartMath organisation is recognised internationally as one of the most effective and fastest growing organisational transformation systems in the world today. Many HeartMath studies have been published in peer-reviewed journals including the 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. Numerous organisational case studies have been completed in North America and Europe. HeartMath clients include three of the nation's top ten 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, IN) and leading corporations such as Shell, BP, Unilever, Boeing and Hewlett Packard

For Information
Telephone: (02) 9412 2500 (Australia)
Telephone: +61 2 9412 2500 (International)
E-Mail: info@heartmath.com.au