Healthcare Personnel Wellbeing is Emerging as a Significant Occupational Health Issue

By Kelly M. Pyrek

While classic elements of occupational health remain vital, one related issue is pushing itself to the forefront due in part to the pandemic: healthcare professional wellbeing.

By some estimates, the healthcare sector stands to lose one-third of its workforce due to burnout as well as moral distress and injury triggered by pre-existing factors that were exacerbated by the pandemic. For example, the American Hospital Association (AHA, 2022) warns that 22 percent of nurses may leave their current position providing direct patient care within the next year. According to these nurses, the top three factors influencing the decision to leave are insufficient staffing levels, demanding nature/intensity of workload, and the emotional toll of the job. More than 60 percent of physicians say they experience frequent, severe burnout. The AHA (2022) also reports that 62 percent of healthcare professionals say that worry or stress related to the pandemic has a negative impact on their mental health.

Addressing healthcare personnel wellbeing and the variable of healthcare professionals’ emotional exhaustion as a predictive metric of clinical and operational outcomes are experts from Duke University’s Center for Healthcare Safety and Quality in a study published last year.

In their review, psychologist J. Bryan Sexton, PhD, director of the Duke Center for Healthcare Safety and Quality, and his co-authors Kyle Rehder, MD, and Kathryn C. Adair, PhD, examined the state of the science regarding healthcare worker wellbeing, including how it is measured, what outcomes it predicts, and what institutional and individual interventions may reduce it.

While the healthcare profession provides immense rewards, it poses significant challenges and can take its toll on the physical and mental health of its practitioners – a trend requiring attention that is gaining traction. As Sexton and his colleagues (2021) acknowledge, “Before the global pandemic of 2020 placed an even greater strain on busy and stressed healthcare workers, the impact and consequences of healthcare burnout had already captured the attention of national and international healthcare leaders.”

Despite a proliferation of anecdotal evidence, however, the medical literature has not kept pace, and as Sexton, et al. (2021) point out, “The alarm bells have rung loudly for several years in fact, but the existing peer-reviewed literature does not provide a clear road map for leaders struggling to make evidence-based decisions.” They add, “Remarkably, out of more than 16,000 published articles on burnout in the medical literature, there are fewer than 50 randomized controlled trials focused on interventions to improve burnout in healthcare workers.”

Sexton says healthcare leaders are struggling to get a grip on what they see is a rising tide of worker wellbeing concerns that jeopardize operations and patient outcomes.

Read further from the October 2022 issue HERE