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Other solutions to physician burnout offered by the report include: creating a positive work environment, addressing burnout in training and early in careers, reducing tasks that do not improve patient care, reducing burnout stigma and improving counseling services, and creating a national research agenda on clinician well-being.
“System-level solutions aimed at reducing or preventing burnout for clinicians of all types, across all workplaces and career stages, are essential to supporting a high-functioning health system and satisfactory patient experience. Health care leaders at all levels must take urgent action to uphold clinician well-being as a fundamental value that is essential to the fulfilment of their missions,” said National Academy of Medicine President Victor Dzau.
The report defined burnout as emotional exhaustion, detachment, and a low sense of personal accomplishment. This condition can jeopardize patient care and cause doctors, nurses, and other clinicians to leave the healthcare profession.
Burnout symptoms are present in 35 percent to 54 percent of nurses and physicians and 45 percent to 60 percent of medical students and residents.
The academy observed that stress management strategies are not enough to resolve the clinician burnout problem. Addressing burnout is health system issue arising from the culture of the workplace, healthcare policies and regulations, and social expectations.
“The work system — including the physical environment, the technologies in use, and how care team members interact with each other — deeply influences clinicians’ professional well-being. To provide the best patient care possible, health care organizations must create a work environment that fosters clinicians’ safety, health, and sense of fulfillment,” said Pascale Carayon, Leon and Elizabeth Janssen Professor and Director of the Wisconsin Institute for Healthcare Systems Engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Carayon served as co-chair of the Committee on Systems Approaches to Improve Patient Care by Supporting Clinician Well-Being, which wrote the report.
“For many clinicians, developing real relationships with patients is what attracted us to health care in the first place, but administrative tasks often take us away from patient care,” said Christine Cassel, senior adviser on strategy and policy and professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, and the other committee co-chair.
“With this report, we have a real opportunity to change the culture of health care delivery and help restore clinicians’ well-being and joy in medicine,” Cassel concluded.
