Key takeaways:
If you’re thinking about leaving your job in healthcare, it’s important to consider the timing of your departure and how losing benefits might affect you and your family.
There are often legal and contractual obligations to keep in mind, like providing adequate notice and maintaining continuity of care for your patients.
Finally, thinking about how to leave on good terms with the organization will help ensure your departure doesn’t damage your career or reputation.
Employee turnover in the healthcare industry is exceptionally high, particularly in the wake of the pandemic. Burnout, made worse by staffing shortages, has left many healthcare professionals looking at their options. In fact, according to an annual report from NSI Nursing Solutions, which surveyed nearly 600,000 healthcare workers, hospital staffing turnover during 2021 averaged 25.9% nationwide, compared with 19.5% the year before.
Switching jobs doesn’t come without risk, however. Another survey found that 14% of healthcare workers who quit during the Great Resignation of 2021 regretted the decision. The top reasons for feeling regret included realizing that their old job was better than they thought, encountering bad management at a new job, and finding out that the new job didn’t meet their expectations.
If you’re planning to quit your job, it’s important to weigh all your options first and to try to leave your current employer on good terms. Here, we’ll look at top questions for healthcare providers to consider before taking the plunge and leaving their job.
When should you leave your job?
Timing is perhaps the first thing to think about once you start to consider leaving. If you feel that patient safety, your safety, or your professional license is at risk under your current work conditions, that should generally take precedence over any other considerations.
However, if there is not a safety concern and you are just thinking of moving on, then you can start by timing your departure around your finances, your need for job-related benefits, and your legal and contractual obligations.
Financial considerations
If your organization uses a vesting structure for stock options, that is an important consideration. When you’re thinking of leaving a job, it’s important to understand how close you are to the next vesting date and how much you might lose by leaving before that date. And it’s important to understand your company’s policy on what happens to your vested but unpurchased options after you leave. Many companies give you 30 days after you leave to purchase what has vested but not been previously purchased.
Another financial issue to consider is whether or not your company gives annual bonuses, deposits to retirement accounts, or other periodic benefits. If so, and if the date these benefits are distributed is not too far away, it might be worth waiting until after that date to leave.
Health insurance and benefits
It’s no secret that health insurance in the U.S. is expensive, and covering the cost of healthcare yourself can be a significant financial burden. According to Kaiser, the average family premium for employer-sponsored insurance in 2020 was $21,342 per year. Out of that, employees were paying just $5,588, which does not include vision or dental benefits.
If you leave your job, most employers are required to offer you the opportunity to continue your current health insurance plan as part of COBRA, but they are not required to contribute toward the plan.
If you’re thinking of leaving before you’ve used all your paid time off, find out whether your company has a policy of paying departing employees for unused paid leave. Some companies that do pay for unused leave pay only a percentage of your hourly rate, so it’s worth researching your organization’s particular policies.
Finally, there might be a period between your current job and your next one during which you won’t have access to a tax-advantaged retirement account such as a 401k. If your goal is to maximize the use of those accounts each year, you’ll want to determine how much extra you will need to contribute before leaving to make up for not being able to contribute for a period of time.
Legal considerations
For healthcare providers in particular, it’s a good idea to make sure you are covered legally when you leave a job. It’s not uncommon, for example, for providers to have signed a contract that includes a termination clause requiring a certain amount of notice before leaving a job.
Many contracts also include noncompete agreements, sometimes called restrictive covenants. Noncompete agreements can prevent you from caring for patients you treated through your employer and can even prevent you from working within a certain geographic area.
If you signed a noncompete agreement, check to see what the terms are and whether any new jobs you are looking at would violate those terms. It might also be a good idea to consult an attorney to get help interpreting the agreement and determining if it is enforceable.
Another key consideration is ensuring that you maintain continuity of care throughout the process of leaving your job, not only because it is the best thing to do for your patients but also because it can prevent you from being accused of patient abandonment. Maintaining continuity of care includes things like making sure you are caught up on all refill requests so that patients don’t run out of medicine during the transition.
The Georgia Medical Board published a guide to retiring that might also be helpful when switching jobs. It recommends notifying the medical board, notifying your patients, and reviewing your contract to ensure you have met all the obligations in it.
Etiquette
Being considerate about the timing of your departure is one aspect of the etiquette involved in leaving a job, but there are a host of other factors to think about as well. Throughout the process, it’s important to be sensitive to the company’s need for effective communication with your staff and others you have worked with. It’s a good idea to consult the clinic or hospital leadership about who to tell first and when to officially notify patients and employees that you are leaving.
Until both patients and employees are formally notified by you and your employer, it’s best not to tell anyone else at the company that you are leaving. Doing so could spark rumors and undermine the official messaging.
Also, companies need time to plan for how to fill in when an employee leaves, so be sure to give enough notice that they can do so. Two weeks for frontline employees and four weeks for managers is a common timeframe in many jobs, but it could be longer for providers, who might have appointments and procedures already booked. A good rule of thumb for providers is to give 90 days notice, assuming your contract doesn’t have a termination clause requiring even earlier notice.
The bottom line
Why trust our experts?
There are several important considerations healthcare providers should take into account before notifying their company of their departure. In addition to getting the timing right, it’s important to consider how leaving your job will affect your health insurance and other benefits, what you need to do to meet legal obligations to your employer and your patients, and how to follow common etiquette and leave on the best terms possible.
