Background:
Demand for hospitalists continues to rise. Despite reports of high overall provider satisfaction, hospitalist retention and recruitment remain challenging. Identifying specific issues most important to hospitalists may guide efforts to improve and sustain morale. As part of an ongoing longitudinal cohort study, our study sought to evaluate, and guide division performance as related to the 10 most important hospitalist‐identified contributors to morale.
Methods:
This study is part of the development of a hospitalist morale scale (Chandra et al,, in process), After a thorough review of employee morale literature as well as qualitative comments from 2007 and 2008 morale surveys, the authors identified 54 potential contributors to hospitalist morale, Between April and May 2009, 22 academic hospitalist physicians completed a Web‐based survey, rating the importance of each issue as a contributor to morale and how satisfied he or she was with each issue, Importance and satisfaction with each issue were rated on 5‐point Likert scales where importance was rated from 1 = not at all to 5 = tremendously, and satisfaction was rated from 1 = very dissatisfied to 5 = very satisfied. Issues were then ranked according to an importance score (IS; range 0–1), which is the proportion of physicians who rated importance as 4 or 5. The top 10 issues were then given a satisfaction score (SS; range 0–1), which is the proportion of participants who rated satisfaction as 4 or 5.
Results:
Participant response rate was 85%. Importance scores for the top 10 issues ranged from 0.84 to 0.95, whereas SS for the top 10 issues ranged from 0.60 to 0.95. The most important issue was relationship with patients (IS of 0.95 and SS of 085). Time available for scholarly work ranked second, with an IS of 0.94 and an SS of 0.65. The highest satisfaction scores were for support from and approachability of division leaders, SS of 0.94 and 0.94. respectively. The lowest SS was for institutional efficiency, at 0.30 (see Table 1.)
Conclusions:
Our study highlights 10 useful keys for program evaluation and optimization of hospitalist morale. Our hospitalists reported moderate to high satisfaction with all issues except institutional efficiency. The vast majority reported high satisfaction with division leadership and with patient relationships, thus representing key issues for which sustaining high SS is the goal. Having satisfaction scores between 0.6 and 0.75, the remaining issues represent key areas of focus for our hospitolist division. Our findings are already being utilized to guide divisional and institutional changes, further the construction of a hospitalist morale scale, and serve as a benchmark for future studies.
Author Disclosure:
S. Chandra, none; G. Kargul, none; E. Howell, none; T. Panek, none; S. Wright, none.