During the COVID-19 pandemic, physician burnout and job dissatisfaction rates reached historic highs. In the years since, burnout rates have come down — though not nearly enough to ease concerns about the nation’s physician shortage and patient access to high-quality care.
Every three years since 2011, researchers at Stanford (Calif.) Medicine have surveyed practicing physicians to track changes in burnout and well-being among the workforce. The latest edition, published April 9 in Mayo Clinic Proceedings, is based on responses from more than 7,600 physicians surveyed between late 2023 and early 2024.
Overall, 45.2% of physicians reported experiencing at least one symptom of burnout in 2023. This is down from 62.8% from an off-cycle version of the survey conducted at the height of the pandemic in 2021. Still, experts say burnout rates in medicine are stubbornly high. As part of their analysis, researchers also compared physician burnout rates to a sample of non-physician workers from the general population.
After adjusting for age, gender, hours worked per week and other factors, they found that physicians were 82.3% more likely to experience burnout than employees in other jobs.
“While the improvement in physician burnout is encouraging, levels remain substantially higher than the rest of the U.S. workforce,” Tait Shanafelt, MD, lead study author and chief wellness officer at Stanford Medicine, told Becker’s. “Given the evidence that physician burnout impacts patient experience, quality, reductions in clinical work effort, turnover and the cost of care delivered, the high rates of occupational burnout continue to have a substantial detrimental impact on organizational effectiveness and the ability of organizations to respond to the other challenges they are facing.”
Health systems seeing notable improvements in physician staffing and engagement measures have made well-being a core organizational priority, Dr. Shanafelt said. They are easing clinicians’ practice through efforts to reduce administrative burdens and improve operational efficiency. They are also formalizing mentorship and leadership development programs, and delivering on flexibility demands.
“The organizations making progress recognize clinician well-being as a critical driver of how rapidly they are able to advance their other strategic priorities,” Dr. Shanafelt said. “Once the essential role of workforce well-being to achieving their mission is grasped, they establish the leadership, structure and processes to drive incremental and sustained progress.”
One area into which many systems are leaning is ambient clinical documentation tools, which use AI to listen to medical appointments and draft clinical notes. Clinicians who have piloted these tools over the past year at numerous academic health systems have reported spending less time on documentation outside of work and higher job satisfaction. One recent study led by researchers at Sacramento, Calif.-based Sutter Health found burnout rates fell from 42.1% to 35.1% among 57 clinicians who were surveyed before and after ambient AI implementation.
Some health systems are also embracing more flexible role structures and scheduling practices to keep physicians engaged through different phases of their career. That includes accommodating part-time needs and enabling primary care physicians to spend part of their week focused on particular areas of interest, such as weight management. These changes require careful workforce planning, but the alternative — losing physicians entirely — comes at a greater cost, leaders say.
“The number of organizations implementing these approaches has grown rapidly over the last several years and the organizations that don’t are going to be left behind,” Dr. Shanafelt said. “They will have difficulty maintaining an adequate physician workforce.”
While the latest national data shows burnout rates remain high, the impact of ambient AI tools is not yet reflected in these trends, with most systems still in early stages of adoption. Many hospitals are also still working to define what flexibility can look and feel like without disrupting care continuity.
