The COVID-19 pandemic has ramped up stress levels for healthcare professionals, causing some to reevaluate their work-life balance. Others have left the field altogether, creating a need for new clinicians. Christine Blackburn, BSN, an administrator at the South Kansas City SurgiCenter in Overland Park, said on "Becker's Ambulatory Surgery Centers Podcast" that she has to change things up when recruiting younger surgeons to her ASC.
This is an edited excerpt. Download the full episode here.
Question: With some physicians being toward the end of their career, potentially looking at retirement sooner than usual, and then trying to recruit new physicians into the center, what does that look like for you? What are you doing that's been successful to bring in some of the new physicians?
Christine Blackburn: I think it's just visiting these physicians that we know are available, talking to them, taking them out to dinner, letting them know what a great ASC we have. Low [surgical site infection rates], high patient satisfaction scores, our turnovers — that's what they want to hear about.
The younger surgeons, that's a little bit harder because they tend to come out with a lot of debt. They may not have a chunk of change to invest in a surgery center. So how can I help with that too? So working with bankers to help these new surgeons to get them down the road, because long-term, this is what they're going to want to do. [An ASC] is a good investment.
On retirement is when the surgeons come to me and talk with me — we try to get a plan, an exit strategy for these surgeons on who's going to take over your business. We had one retire, a fabulous physician, and he actually had a great exit plan on how he was sending his patients and who he was sending them to. And so that helped us with that referral string, too.