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Sachin H. Jain: The highest value any healthcare organization is the goodwill of the people in its employ

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Jul 12, 2024, 12:53

Sachin H. Jain: The highest value any healthcare organization is the goodwill of the people in its employ

Sachin H. Jain shared a post on LinkedIn:

”The highest value (but unstated) item on the balance sheet of any healthcare organization is the goodwill of the people in its employ.

This goodwill translates every day into employees going above and beyond in service of patients.

When this goodwill is honored and respected, employees will routinely take less money than they could make elsewhere (and work longer and harder) in service of the organization and its patients.

With all of the chatter about healthcare workforce shortages, we are burying the lede that many healthcare organizations have taken actions—big and small, intentionally and unintentionally— that have irreparably impaired that goodwill.

These actions have translated into the quiet transformation of large swaths of the healthcare workforce from people dedicated to the mission of organizations into quiet quitters and mercenaries.

Intrinsically motivated professionals have slowly but surely transformed into commoditized workers who populate most other industries.

Fundamentally, the problem is leadership. We have a generation of organizational leaders who don’t recognize the irreplaceable intrinsic value of this goodwill.

Common sense has become uncommon.

The result?

Once special healthcare organizations have transformed from small and missional to large and corporate and impersonal.

And it is all of us who are now suffering as patients in a healthcare system that now treats patients in the same impersonal way that it treats its once special workforce.

Karma of the worst kind.”

Source: Sachin H. Jain/LinkedIn

Sachin H. Jain is the President and CEO of SCAN Group and Health Plan and an Adjunct Professor of Medicine at Stanford University School of Medicine. He also serves as a Board Member at The Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowships for New Americans, an Academic Hospitalist (WOC) at the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, and a Board Member at America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP).