How Hospitals and Health Systems Are Battling Burnout in Health Care | U.S. News Live

Some 46% of health care workers reported experiencing burnout in 2022, according to a recent report released by the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention, up from 32% in 2018. Some estimates have even placed the cost of burnout to the U.S. health system at $4.6 billion annually.

While rates of burnout in health care trended downward prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, the last few years have resulted in dramatic increases, experts noted during a recent webinar hosted by U.S. News & World Report.

At the start of the webinar, Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia acknowledged “the mental health toll, that death and loss at such a massive scale has visited upon the entire global population – but particularly upon the front-line health care providers who had to do so very much.”

Kaine and others have advocated for legislative action, such as the Dr. Lorna Breen Health Care Provider Protection Act, which was signed into law last March by President Joe Biden and provides financial and other support for mental health education and treatment for health care professionals.

While federal legislation is a good start, it is only one piece of the puzzle that is overcoming burnout in health care, experts said, with employers and health systems themselves needing to lead the way to provide systematic and sustained support within the workplace. The World Health Organization defines burnout as “a syndrome conceptualized as resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed.”

“Core to really addressing the issue of health care worker burnout is leadership commitment,” said Dr. Lotte Dyrbye, chief well-being officer at the University of Colorado School of Medicine. “You can’t deliver on your mission if your most mission-critical assets – your health care workers – are suffering from high degrees of burnout.”

Indeed, the stakes are high from an operational, financial and safety standpoint, panelists noted. “We know that doctors who are burnt out are more likely to commit major medical errors,” Dyrbye said. “The level of burnout in nurses and doctors in the ICU is an independent predictor of patients dying. Whether or not you get an infection when you’re in the hospital is related to whether or not your nurse is burnt out.”

In some cases, burnout potentially pushes practitioners out of medicine altogether. And the problem ranges across virtually all health professions.

“Pick a category of worker,” and there’s likely a shortage, causing “huge cascading impacts” in care, said Dr. Sunita Mutha, the director of the Healthforce Center at the University of California San Francisco. UCSF’s Healthforce Center has expanded its focus to a commonly overlooked subset of health care workers, middle-skilled workers, such as medical and nursing assistants or food service technicians. For example, “we found that up to 40% of the staff reported some food insecurity,” she said, which often results in higher stress levels and absenteeism.

What’s more, the “tremendous” administrative burdens faced by health care workers further strains their workload and can limit their interaction with patients, added Dr. John Howard, the director of the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, which is part of the CDC. NIOSH recently launched Impact Wellbeing, a multipronged campaign aimed at reducing burnout among health care workers across the country. The campaign offers the hospital executives resources and strategies to better support their staff.

In addition to legislative and administrative efforts to improve the workplace for health care professionals, the field would do well to consider a culture shift, said Dr. Heather Farley, chief wellness officer at ChristianaCare in Delaware. Farley is also an emergency physician, and she said that emergency medicine sees “the highest levels of burnout with high workload, often low resources and a high exposure to trauma.” Recounting her personal story of burnout, she experienced the “culture of shame and blame and silence” that often discourages physicians from voicing their struggles.

“It wasn’t OK to say that you were struggling with something because maybe that meant that you weren’t cut out for this work, so I didn’t talk to anybody about it, and it took me a long time to get through that and to claw my way back,” she said.

Inspired by stories like hers, ChristianaCare has developed peer support programs as well as so-called psychological first aid training for leaders, which is also expanding to all employees. The goal of the effort is to reduce the burden of action on individual workers by providing leaders and front-line health workers with “skills to recognize when someone is struggling, to respond effectively and then to get them connected with the appropriate resources,” Farley said.

As health care tackles the stigma of mental health struggles, Dyrbye stressed the need for additional support for historically underrepresented groups, such as certain minority groups and women, who may face added stressors and even harassment due to their identities: “Health systems have an obligation to have policies and procedures in place for how we deal with these workplace issues,” she said.

Still, while mental health resources aimed at practitioners grow, the present medical system may inadvertently discourage their use, particularly the medical licensing process.

Howard pointed out that prospective providers seeking licensure in a state or credentials at a hospital often find questions such as “Have you ever sought mental health care?” on their application forms. So, those suffering burnout might risk even their career by seeking mental health care, he noted.

Despite the difficulty navigating burnout, experts agree that the time to eradicate the issue is now: “We can’t afford not to act,” Dyrbye said. “There’s a business case for it, and there’s certainly a moral case for it.”