Over the last few years, most health care facilities have become intensely aware of the need to increase patient satisfaction. However, with today's more consumer-driven market, this can be a daunting task for even the most experienced health care manager. Recent studies indicate that focusing on employee satisfaction and subsequent employee retention may be strong catalysts to patient satisfaction. This study offers a review of how employee satisfaction and retention correlate with patient satisfaction and also examines the current ways health care organizations are focusing on employee satisfaction and retention.

A study was conducted to analyze the perceptions of chief executive officers in US hospitals regarding leadership development and succession planning. Results of the study were compared to identical surveys delivered in previous years for the purposes of identifying possible trends and changing perspectives related to how executives use succession planning in their facilities, what factors influence the identification of successors, what positions are the more likely to use succession planning efforts, and who specifically should be responsible for building the leadership pipeline.

A mini-study was conducted to collect self-reported employee turnover rates in U.S.hospitals. The results indicate many hospitals are struggling with high employee turnover rates.Wide-spread variances in ratings were observed across hospitals which may be due to lack of consistency in how they each calculate their employee turnover. This makes benchmarking for the purposes of performance improvement challenging.