Supporting Systems to Address Clinician Burnout
National Academy of Medicine calls for action to address a crisis among clinicians.
As a nurse and researcher who has worked in the area of clinician burnout for many years, I was pleased to see attention to this issue by the National Academy of Medicine (NAM) in a recent consensus study report, Taking Action Against Clinician Burnout: A Systems Approach to Professional Well-Being.
Burnout, a syndrome of “emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and lack of personal accomplishment” (Maslach et al. 2001. Job Burnout. Annu Rev Psychol. 52: 397-422), has far-reaching and troubling consequences for health care clinicians. The problem has grown to crisis levels: estimates indicate that 35%-45% of the nearly 4 million nurses in the U.S. are experiencing symptoms of burnout, and up to 54% of our physician colleagues experience it as well.
A ‘chronic imbalance’ of job demands with available resources.
Prominent among the factors contributing to burnout are the systemic patterns that erode professional fulfillment and well-being, many of which are beyond the control of individual clinicians. Burnout represents a chronic imbalance of job demands with resources needed to meet them.
The National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine (NASEM), of which NAM is a part, convened a committee to examine the scientific evidence towards understanding the scope and consequences of burnout on […]