It Takes Mayo Clinic 3 Whole Years To Decide If A Doctor's Good Enough For Them

The Mayo Clinic is one of the best-known and regarded health care systems in the world, and has been for over a century.

According to CEO Dr. John Noseworthy, one of the things that's made that happen is an incredibly committed and highly-skilled workforce. Part of that is the fact that Mayo rigorously trains many of its own people, "from technologists all the way up through heart and brain surgeons," Dr. Noseworthy told Business Insider. Another is the huge desire for people from the outside to join them.

"Whenever we post a nursing position, we usually have over 20 applicants for that single job," he revealed.

But what distinguishes Mayo is its incredible commitment to a culture where the patient is valued and comes first. To make sure that remains true, they have an incredibly involved hiring process for doctors. It takes around 3 years for anyone to become a full consultant at the Mayo Clinic, Noseworthy told us:

"If they come from outside and we don't know them, they basically come for a two- to three-day visit where we watch them practice and teach and talk about their science to see if they're a good fit for us. Competence and passion and compassion are all necessary, but there has to be a fit. When they're hired they're kept on for three years before we decide whether they'll be kept on as a full consultant. It's a period of testing them, and then staff votes and says this person is or is not someone who we want to keep on as a consultant. So there's quite a training period."

During that period and during all training, there's a huge focus on culture and what it means to work at Mayo. That's led to a staff that, according to Noseworthy, often spends their entire career with the health system, and an incredibly low rate of turnover for physicians of one to two percent a year.

Building such a culture and committed workforce takes a great deal of time and effort, but pays huge dividends in the long run.