March 22, 2023
Providers | Tea Leaves
  • A Modern Healthcare article says that health care providers such as Advocate Health, Ochsner Health, and Inspira Health are turning their focus to long-term, creative, and cost-effective investments to support employee mental health. With greater attention to employee satisfaction and mental health, health system leaders are ramping up programs that existed before the pandemic, investing in new initiatives, and making organizational changes to destigmatize mental illness. Executives say they rely on employee feedback to determine what strategies work best. (Article here)
  • Some providers are trying to achieve balance in hospital governance by including nurses in the boardroom. Amid the nursing labor shortage, providers’ financial pressures, the increasing prominence of quality measures, and the tension between nurse unions and systems, it’s imperative that nurses have a seat at the table, industry observers say. Nurses make up more than a third of the 16.7 million jobs in health care, but despite their outsized role in care delivery, a range of systemic and logistical barriers have limited their influence on how hospitals and health systems are run. Nearly 80 percent of the 933 hospital and health system CEOs polled by the American Hospital Association from November 2021 to March 2022 said their organizations had at least one physician board member, but only 43 percent had a nurse board member. (Article here)