Clinician burnout is a highly visible problem that impacts many aspects of healthcare organizations, including staff shortages, quality of care and revenues.
During a June Becker's Hospital Review webinar sponsored by Cardinal Health™, a panel of experts on clinical burnout and staffing discussed how burnout affects clinicians and what organizations can do to mitigate it. Panelists were:
- Sandy Albright, clinical consultant, Cardinal Health
- Ebony Cherry, licensed mental health clinician, Cardinal Health
- Hope L. Johnson, vice president, perioperative services, Lehigh Valley Health Network in Allentown, Pa.
Five key takeaways were:
1. Clinician burnout is widespread and costly. Burnout is a work-related phenomenon resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed. It has been the subject of many studies since the 1970s, as multiple professional organizations have highlighted its impact on clinicians, organizations and society. According to a 2019 report by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine1, between 35 and 54 percent of US-based physicians and nurses experience substantial symptoms of burnout. "High rates of burnout are a signal to healthcare leaders and organizations that an improvement in the clinical work environment is required," Ms. Albright said.
2. Burnout is an obstacle to well-being that manifests as exhaustion, cynicism/disengagement and a lack of accomplishment. It is typically caused by four main factors:
- Unrealistic or unmanageable workplace demands (high caseload, poorly designed technologies, chronic overtime, excessive on-call burden).
- Lack of autonomy over how nurses do their work.
- Role confusion around workplace procedures and responsibilities.
- Lack of fairness in how resources and opportunities are allocated.
Additional factors include unusual shift requirements, mismatched skills, understaffing, high numbers of temporary staff and a decreased sense of working as part of a team.
3. Mitigating burnout is key to improving staff well-being, as well as also patient care and revenues. Burnout that leads to high turnover or nurse exhaustion increases nurse-to-patient ratios and the likelihood of taking shortcuts or making medical errors. This in turn results in lower patient satisfaction scores, which reduces providers' ability to renew insurance contracts and keep the flow of revenues. "Burnout snowballs into many different things [that add up to] not being able to provide the care that we can or want," Ms. Johnson said.
4. To reduce burnout, healthcare organizations should start with an assessment of the work environment. That means moving away from the tendency to focus on individual nurses and ponder, "What's wrong with that nurse? How do we help the nurse cope?" and toward examining the work conditions and experiences that deplete nurses, Ms. Cherry said.
5. Measures that mitigate burnout include ensuring access to adequate supplies. Nurses often spend too much time looking for needed supplies at the expense of providing patient care. "When nurses have to leave the bedside to search for supplies, they extend patient discomfort and anxiety. In the perioperative environment, this may extend anesthesia and surgical times and patient outcomes could be impacted as a result," Ms. Albright said.
Cardinal Health works with clinicians to develop kits and custom procedure trays to help meet their supply needs for specific patient tasks, including intravenous starts, dressing changes and surgical and invasive procedures.
1. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, Reducing Food Loss and Waste: A Call to Action (Washington, DC: The National Academies Press, 2021), https://doi.org/10.17226/25521.