Blog: Taking Care of Patients Starts with Taking Care of Our Employees

By Kristine Meade, Executive Vice President and Chief Human Resources Officer

If you don’t care about your clinicians or your employees as an organization, how can you expect them to deliver the best patient care? Building a clinician-driven organization means promoting a culture that is focused on the experience people have being a part of your company, It is about creating the appropriate environment where people feel cared for and have what they need to ensure they can be their best selves, ultimately, from a work perspective, for their patients. By investing in and taking care of our clinicians, we position them to deliver high quality patient care and produce optimal outcomes.

For clinicians, a focus on wellness is a big part of the value proposition. Being an employer of choice requires engaging with clinicians to listen and understand what’s important to them at different stages of their careers. Competitive compensation and being able to manage the complexity of work and home lives are always key factors, but it’s not one-size-fits-all and needs change over time. To prevent burnout, we must support the total individual, with workplace strategies that give employees the ability to perform their best in any aspect of their lives: work, personal life, charitable and social responsibility contributions, whatever it is that they’re passionate about. We know we are not there yet but we are working on it and striving to meet our intended goals.

What we do know is that clinicians want to feel valued by an organization. They want to contribute to their chosen profession. They thrive in being in a clinical setting and delivering exceptional patient care. Our role as an employer is to be a strong organization with the commitment and capacity to fulfill these needs by:

1. Investing in leadership and clinical programs for ongoing professional development
2. Innovating to streamline technology and paperwork so clinicians can deliver the best bedside care
3. Creating a safe space where people can ask for help and support when they need it
4. Focusing on our employees’ total health and wellness
5. Creating an environment that allows people to leave the clinical setting with the energy to enjoy their families, friends, and whatever is important to them in their diverse lives.

For clinicians, a focus on wellness is a big part of the employee value proposition. Share on X

When your organization is a service business with a mission to create exceptional experiences every day, you must create alignment between the patient experience, the customer experience, and the employee or clinician experience. NAPA is focused on weaving our clinician-driven culture into the fabric of the company, so that we can deliver on every experience, every time.