By Phil Jost, MBA, CanAm Blog Post, August 28, 2014
After many years of trial and error as a senior health manager and CEO, I have come to the conclusion that there are only two ‘reasonable’ physician retention plan options:
Option A: Physician Retention starts from the moment of the screening of potential candidates to ensure that they conform to your organization’s hiring criteria. It is critical to ensure that the appropriate questions are presented to the candidate to test their long term career commitment. I highly recommend that you seriously consider offering a site visit to a thoroughly screened, interviewed, and short-listed candidate. This key financial investment will reap huge returns when you finally engage the services of that ideal physician candidate that fits your organization’s culture, and brings exciting new innovative ideas to further empower your healthcare team.
The placement of a new physician, due to the prior professional commitments of the candidate to his current employer and/or immigration processing, may take several weeks, or even months. Therefore, it is critical that you maintain open and ongoing communication with the physician and their family to ensure that important ongoing relationship building, and the anticipation of a warm welcome is maintained.
Finally, once the physician and their family arrive, you must implement an orientation plan for the physician, and their family….and into the future you must ensure that relationship building becomes an ongoing process of inclusion for the physician and family – only then can you be sure of the highest retention outcomes.
Option B: Develop a highly restrictive employment contract that includes high financial penalties should a physician candidate decide to conclude their employment contract prematurely. Although, it is my experience that this approach will result in the attainment of the desired contracted retention period, there is a serious down-side to this plan. Specifically, if this option is not supported by Plan A, it will result in disillusioned candidates that will become negative influences within your organization until the stipulated contract limitations expire.
Consequently, my advice to avoid retention failure is to engage the services of an established professional physician recruitment firm to provide astute consulting services and ongoing support to develop and implement a Physician Retention Plan tailored to your needs to ensure optimal physician placement and retention outcomes.
