While workload is often blamed for “burnout,” people didn’t become healthcare professionals by not working hard. Rather, it is the nature of the work and how they are treated by healthcare organizations. Dive deep and you’ll see that workers repeatedly point to their invisibility, lack of agency, and the ways in which their needs are ignored as the source of the problem.
One surgeon with whom I spoke said, “We are within an environment that is becoming carcinogenic. There are infinite demands on me with no relief in sight. We are constantly asked for more and no one cares that we have no more to give.”
In simple terms, the leaders of hospitals, health systems, and health plans should make their big (and growing) impersonal institutions feel small again, organizing them into intimate, smaller units where people feel ownership and empowerment.
They should stop referring to everyone who sees a patient generically as a “provider. They should push technologists and regulators to reduce the onerous burden of bureaucratic paperwork and instead maximize every opportunity for clinical workers to interact with patients. And they should ensure that clinicians at every level are key members of their organizations’ leadership teams, involved at every step in determining the future of their organizations.
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