How to Manage Burnout in Healthcare - ApplicantStack

Even before the pandemic turned the situation critical, healthcare workers reported high levels of stress and burnout. For some, this meant leaving the industry altogether. Dr. Vivek Murthy, the U.S. Surgeon General, highlighted the urgency of addressing burnout in healthcare workers in May 2022, warning of a future without enough doctors, nurses, and other critical health workers.

The burden of managing healthcare burnout often falls on managers and supervisors, who are themselves at risk of burnout. Below are ideas to help reduce healthcare worker burnout at all levels.

What is Burnout?

Occupational burnout is a symptom that can affect any worker in any industry. It’s defined as a pervasive sense of exhaustion and cynicism accompanied by low satisfaction with work responsibilities. These feelings can lead to mental health symptoms like depression, anxiety, insomnia, impaired cognitive function, conflict with friends and family, and physical pain.

Healthcare workers are trained to offer focus, dedication, and compassion to their patients regardless of the person or condition. According to an advisory published by the Department of Health and Human Services, burnout in healthcare can manifest when health workers know the best healthcare decision to make but feel helpless and unable to act due to limited resources or circumstances beyond their control. Sustained moral distress can lead to moral injury, which has been linked to feelings of profound guilt, shame, anger, and other psychological impacts.

In other words, healthcare workers may feel unable to respond to potentially life-threatening situations according to their training, making healthcare burnout a particularly critical problem to address. Dr. Murthy described the crisis as follows: “If we fail to act, we will place our nation’s health at increasing risk. As the burnout and mental health crisis among health workers worsens, this will affect the public’s ability to get routine preventive care, emergency care, and medical procedures. Equally as important, we will send a message to millions of health workers and trainees that their suffering does not matter.”

Addressing Core Issues of Burnout in Healthcare

Though Dr. Murthy’s description sounds dire, there are solutions to help whole hospital systems and individuals within your employ.

Even before the pandemic—which stretched every healthcare organization and worker to well beyond its limits—the healthcare industry has experienced changes that contributed to the problem. According to the HHS advisory, these included:

• ​Advances in medical biotechnology accompanied by burdensome administrative tasks and requirements
• ​Training and application of complex medical information
• ​Decades of decreases in funding for public health initiatives
• ​Widening disparities in healthcare availability
• ​A population that’s living longer with increasing demand for complex healthcare needs
• ​Difficulty in addressing patients’ social determinants of health (racial, socioeconomic, and geographic factors)
• ​National and state regulations
• ​Harassment and even violence
• ​Limited flexibility

Many of those factors are out of the control of healthcare organizations, but policies and procedures can help mitigate the negative effects on workers.

Breaking the Cycle of Healthcare Worker Burnout

A 2018 study by Diedre E. Mylod and Thomas H. Lee surveyed 80,000 healthcare workers. Though it doesn’t have the effects of the pandemic in its data, its conclusions are still very relevant. The survey analyzed two factors associated with worker burnout:

• ​Activation: The extent to which a person is motivated by their work and feels it is meaningful
• ​Decompression: The degree to which one can withdraw, recharge, and enjoy life outside of work

Workers were asked to rank from 1 to 5 a series of statements related to both factors to determine a correlation between the two. This data is traditionally used to determine factors like satisfaction with working for a particular organization, feeling confident in recommending it to others both for work and for receiving care, and feeling proud of its contributions to the community.

“The science of studying burnout and resilience is young,” Mylod and Lee write, “but our experience suggests that measuring decompression and activation can enrich our understanding of the multiple relevant dynamics and support an array of tailored interventions.”

They cite an example where a nurse reports having trouble sleeping. Rather than encourage the nurse to merely get more sleep, it’s vital to discover what about the work environment is making it difficult for the nurse to decompress and sleep restfully. It requires leadership to put aside assumptions or common ideas about the healthcare workforce and ask the kinds of questions that yield real answers. With that data—specific to your organization—the right interventions and solutions become clear.

Support for Healthcare Worker Burnout

In a 2023 article published in the Journal of Primary and Medical Health, the authors identified some strategies for addressing burnout in the healthcare industry. This multi-pronged approach includes:

• ​Counseling and mindfulness services such as individual therapy, group discussions, or resilience training
• ​Adequate staffing and manageable workloads
• ​Access to personal development opportunities, such as conference attendance or paid time for additional training
• ​Provision for some autonomy and control over the work environment
• ​Peer support activities, such as an employee book club or social gatherings
• ​A work culture that encourages balance, with sufficient meal and rest breaks, flexibility with sick leave and PTO, financial or emotional support to cultivate interests outside of work
• ​A work culture that encourages workers to seek help early for signs of burnout without fear of stigma or retribution
• ​Organizational priority on worker wellbeing over efficiency or budgetary concerns
• ​Organizational acknowledgement that the burden for worker wellbeing is not solely on the worker; management shares the responsibility for systemic support

Healthcare workers are among the most vital part of any society. They’re the first to arrive in a crisis and the last ones out, and assessing each healthcare worker’s individual wellbeing is a vital part of managing a healthcare organization. Strong evidence suggests burnout is a looming crisis with some very possible solutions. An honest assessment of how your organization is falling short is the first step in changing culture for the better.

The way you recruit and onboard new members of the team can also impact the overall success of your healthcare workforce. Explore a solution that ensures a user-friendly application experience with applicant management tools that simplify the healthcare recruiting process. Plus, a consistent onboarding experience can set the tone for each new hire’s experience.