Keeping the group together: What spells success?

Physician retention is vital to the financial health and cultural happiness of a practice. Targeted recruiting and attentive leadership are keys to keeping turnover rates low.

By Mike Norbut, AMNews staff. May 2, 2005.

If you're part of the management of your practice, you may have heard colleagues leaving for a new position say: "I feel undervalued."

"There's not enough support."

"The pressure is too great."

In some situations, it might not be so bad to see that physician go. Perhaps he or she resisted the established culture, didn't meet the group's productivity expectations. Or, the issue could be outside the practice, such as a spouse who didn't like the community.

But it also could mean that your group didn't put enough effort into retention.

In all the talk about landing the right candidate, the concept of retaining that physician sometimes gets lost. The two ideas are interconnected, but with the daily pressures of running a practice, it's sometimes easy to forget that the sales effort doesn't end when the physician takes the job.

Consultants and group leaders say it takes honest, targeted recruiting and responsive leadership to retain your best doctors. In the interest of both harmony and fiscal responsibility, less turnover should be a goal of every practice; after all, losing candidates a couple of years after you hire them is certainly a more costly mistake than not being able to hire them in the first place.

"Most groups have a strong compensation and benefits package, but it takes a lot more to keep people long term," said Marc Greenwald, MD, chief medical officer and a critical care internist at Fallon Clinic, a 240-physician multispecialty group based in Worcester, Mass. "They look for that warm and fuzzy sense of belonging. That can occur by accident or by design."