Becoming a Well-being Advocate

By now, burnout and its related toll on clinicians nationwide are recognized as a pressing crisis. While burnout among U.S. health care practitioners isn’t new, the COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated pre-existing issues and added novel stressors. A recent study showed that burnout, work overload, and COVID-19–associated stressors resulted in one in five physicians and two in five nurses intending to leave their current practice within the next two years.1 In addition to the ample negative impacts on individuals, burnout is a monumental staffing challenge hospital medicine groups must face. Read Pierce, MD, chief of the division of hospital medicine at Dell Medical School in Austin, Texas, shared how the pandemic led him to a first in his career: having to sit down with some of his staff and tell them they needed to see a mental health professional. “There’s such a stigma around that and we’ve been trained to set it aside or avoid it. Those were real challenges, and I knew we needed to do more than the usual things to keep people supported,” he said. As 2022 began and the Omicron variant was in full force, Dr. Pierce saw burnout rates nearly double from the prior year to 50% within his group. As burnout rates increased, the rate of volunteerism among his group drastically decreased, something Dr. Pierce had never seen among his team. He saw the lack of volunteerism as a sign of self-preservation for his group members. Due to its association with loss of empathy, impair...
Source: The Hospitalist - Category: Hospital Management Authors: Tags: Mental Health Quality Improvement Source Type: research