APAC healthcare board administrators make decisions that impact the financial and operational workings of a healthcare organisation. These decisions can include everything from improving patient access and affordability to deciding which ESG funds to invest in. However, if diminishing clinical retention has dominated recent meetings, the board may need to take a more proactive role in addressing the issue.
What is Clinician Retention?
Clinician retention refers to a health organisation’s ability to keep its healthcare professionals—such as doctors, nurse practitioners, allied health practitioners, and mental health providers—employed over the long term. Strong retention means clinicians choose to stay with the organisation rather than seeking roles elsewhere.
Clinician retention is important for several reasons:
- Continuity of care: When clinicians stay, patients benefit from ongoing relationships, consistent treatment plans, and better health outcomes.
- Workforce stability: High retention reduces staffing disruptions, vacancy gaps, and the pressure placed on remaining clinicians.
- Cost savings: Recruiting, onboarding, and training new clinicians is expensive. Retaining existing staff lowers operational costs.
- Organisational culture: Stable teams strengthen morale, support collaboration, and reduce burnout across the workforce.
- Quality and safety: Experienced clinicians understand organisational processes and clinical protocols, which supports safer, higher-quality care.
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Clinician Retention Plan: Step-by-Step Procedures
For optimum healthcare clinician retention, the board of directors can follow recommended procedures, take key actions, and recognise those in executive leadership who should be the accountable parties responsible for executing and maintaining that plan.
Procedure | Key Actions | Owner |
1. Set up leadership and governance. | Appoint executive sponsor and clinician lead; form steering group; define scope and cadence. | CEO/CMO |
2. Establish baseline metrics. | Collect turnover, vacancy, burnout, eNPS; build dashboard. | HR |
3. Listen and identify pain points. | Run surveys, focus groups, stay/exit interviews; map clinician journey | HR |
4. Spot hotspots and risks. | Segment data by unit/role/tenure; quantify cost of turnover and agency | HR, Finance |
5. Prioritize solutions. | Co-design interventions with clinicians; select top 3-5 initiatives. | Steering Group |
6. Resource and formalize plan. | Build ROI case; secure budget, staff, and policy updates (flexibility, mentoring, wellbeing). | HR, Finance |
7. Pilot and scale. | Launch pilots in hotspots; remove administrative burdens; roll out successful models across sites. | PMO, Unit Leaders |
How Healthcare Boards Support Clinician Retention
Boards need to maintain focus on clinician retention. Here are 5 examples of how boards accomplish clinician retention.
1. Workforce Wellbeing & Turnover Prevention
Boards make decisions to establish and include clinician well-being metrics on board dashboards, alongside important financial and operational KPIs. They encourage policies that balance shift loads, telehealth options, and flexible scheduling, while ensuring access to confidential support, counselling, and resilience programs tailored for clinicians.
2. Career Development & Recognition
Mentorship, career development courses, and recognition programs are valuable to the growth and success of a clinician workforce. For example, taking ESG courses and earning ESG certifications may unlock new opportunities. These aspects of encouragement contribute to clinician retention because they give clinicians a sense of satisfaction, pride, and accomplishment, contributing to overall contentment.
3. Governance & Culture
An intense focus on accountability and high-quality patient care complements the clinician’s efforts, making them feel useful and needed. When the board unceasingly improves governance and culture, the clinicians acknowledge that by continuing to be dedicated to that cause.
4. Operational & Resource Support
Ongoing training in governance and operational processes strengthens clinician retention by helping clinicians apply these practices accurately and deliver consistently high-quality care. But training alone isn’t enough. Clinicians also need accessible resources that support their mental health and help them manage issues that may affect their ability to perform.
5. Regional & System-Level Focus
Astute boards recognise the differences in workforce shortages across regions, particularly between rural and urban areas or developed and emerging APAC markets. They actively support exchange initiatives with regional healthcare institutions to broaden career pathways and collaborate with regulators to shape policies on training, migration, and credentialling that ease workforce pressures.
Managing Risk With a Board Portal
Since time can be a factor when reaching important conclusions, reviewing every document or analysing every piece of data may not be an option. However, errors can be made if the board is not fully informed.
A board portal becomes valuable in these instances because it can generate clear summaries of the information and highlight potential risks or compliance red flags.
OnBoard Powers Effective Boards in APAC
Because high-quality patient care depends on it, clinician retention requires careful and constant consideration. Accountability and responsibility must be appropriately assigned so clinical retention can be continually monitored and policy adjustments can be made if improvement is needed.
OnBoard makes it easy to respond to critical issues before the consequences become excessive. The board relies on a team of executives and steering groups to help make the decisions for the success of healthcare organisations. This team collects data, identifies potential issues, and makes improvement recommendations.
OnBoard’s software platform provides protected, role-assigned, easy-to-access storage for any information collected regarding issues, such as clinician retention. Then it clearly summarises the information and presents it on an agenda for the next board meeting. OnBoard Insights AI can then bring emerging risks and compliance red flags to the attention of the board so they can anticipate and address problems.
With OnBoard AI, boards work smarter by automating administrative tasks, strengthening governance workflows, and improving decision-making. With tools that streamline agenda creation, surface emerging risks, and support accurate ESG reporting, OnBoard AI gives directors the clarity and confidence they need to lead effectively.
Time is critical when making decisions about issues like clinician retention. Ask for a Trial Request to experience how OnBoard’s Book AI, Agenda AI, Insights AI, Actions AI, and Assist AI streamline decision-making and strengthen governance.
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