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Our friend Lara Burnside is back on the Healthcare Experience Matters Podcast this week. Lara and our Podcast Director, Casey Callanan, discuss the art of providing great patient experiences to move our workplace culture forward in this new podcast.

Lara currently serves as Senior Vice President, Chief Experience Officer, with JPS Health Network in Texas. We are extremely excited for her second appearance on our show this week.

JPS is the public hospital in Tarrant County, Texas. It serves Fort Worth and the nearby regions within Tarrant County. According to Lara, JPS currently has roughly 7,200 employees and 1.2 million patient encounters throughout their hospital and clinics. JPS is the largest behavioral health provider in North Texas.

Lara has been a healthcare professional for more than two decades with experience in all levels of hospital leadership.

“Making sure our people feel valued, honored, and engaged in the practice really matters in the outcomes that we achieve as an organization,” Lara said. 

With 25 years of experience in this field under her belt, her podcast interviews are full of wisdom and nuggets that we can all benefit from checking out. 

“I have spent my entire career focused on people, and of those 25 years, about 13 of those were as a human resources professional and I have also been in patient experience for about two decades,” she said. 

According to Lara, there’s been a lot of research over the years on the connection between employee engagement and morale and the results are rather clear. 

“Most people want to feel valued, honored, and heard. They want to know that their voice matters and that they have a connection to their boss,” she said.

When employee engagement is high, morale is high, and our patient experience can thrive. What makes this a challenge in today’ environment is that we are experiencing a tremendous level of burnout and turnover.

“For most organizations, I think we’re experiencing about 50% or so of turnover since the pandemic started and a large influx of Gen Y and Gen Z employees as the more tenured employees have retired. That changes how we must promote workplace morale and culture,” she said.

When it comes to issues such as poor communication from leadership, Lara told us that it can have serious implications for workplace culture and the patient experience. 

“There’s never enough communication and in the absence of information, people make up their own stories,” Lara said. 

If you missed her first appearance on our podcast, we encourage you to listen to What Patient Experience Excellence Looks Like to get another outstanding snippet of why Lara has been so successful in her illustrious career. 

We are grateful for her time and enthusiasm in discussing these important topics in our ongoing efforts to elevate the patient experience. 

Watch This Podcast

You can watch today’s podcast with Lara Burnside here:

More HX Matters Podcasts

The five latest episodes of the Healthcare Experience Matters Podcast are available here: 

This podcast is dedicated to transforming the health care experience so that every person can receive and deliver the best care.

You can subscribe to our podcast for free on all major podcast platforms and for video of our interviews, you can always check out the Healthcare Experience Foundation (HXF) on YouTube. Catch up on all  episodes of our podcast by subscribing and following us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, Amazon Music and more.

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Culture, PRC