Physician Turnover Costs & Causes, Healthcare Recruitment Challenges Continue

Emergency medicine physician Dr. Travis Ulmer blogged about some of the reasons why new physicians often don't stick with their first jobs. 

The main points to this blog post have to do with new physicians being relatively inexperienced with contract review, benefit packages, and compensation negotiation. The blog could have expanded on ways to avoid this problem by casting a wider geographic net, starting the interview process early, and avoiding saturated job markets, but this is still a very good article and definitely worth a read for any resident physicians who are getting closer to that first "real job".

There’s a good reason why approximately half of all EM docs change jobs within their first several years of practice. It’s really tough to know what the right fit is just out of residency. Many of us, not having any real basis for comparison, resort to the only real apples to apples metric we understand: hourly rate. Now I understand how important it is to consider much more than that.

Physician's Money Digest offered an informative piece about how to calculate the cost of physician turnover.

As the article states, it's simple math, just don't forget to include any of the factors. To calculate physician turnover cost take the monthly revenue generated by that physician and multiply that by the number of months it will take to replace the physician (average time to fill a physician job is around 6 months). Then add in the additional costs such as recruiting fee, advertising fees, signing bonus, interview expenses, relocation expenses, and the cost of your staff's time spent recruiting and interviewing for the open position.

Physician turnover costs can range from a half-million to well over a million dollars.  That’s a pretty wide range, but I’m going to give you a more accurate way to calculate the cost of physician turnover for your particular organization.

The American Staffing Association released it's quarterly Skills Gap Index which shows that 8 of the 10 hardest to fill jobs are in the healthcare industry. 

Shameless plug time, let HospitalRecruiting.com make it a little easier to recruit and source these types of healthcare professionals by advertising your open positions on our website!

The index has identified 158* occupations as hard to fill for the second quarter of 2016, with the 10 most difficult being

1. Heavy and tractor-trailer truck drivers
2. General internists
3. Podiatrists
4. Psychiatrists
5. Physician assistants
6. Merchandise displayers and window trimmers
7. Obstetricians and gynecologists
8. Surgeons
9. Occupational therapists
10. Nurse practitioners