Even before the pandemic, burnout among health care workers was well documented. The pandemic turned it into a crisis. A key component of burnout is depletion, which is characterized by feeling physically and emotionally drained, just barely hanging on — like the ICU nurse who sits in her car outside the hospital and texts a friend, “I don’t think I can make it through another shift.”
5 Ways to Restore Depleted Health Care Workers
Proven strategies that health systems are using to combat employees’ physical and emotional exhaustion.
February 11, 2022
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Summary.
As the pandemic drags on and on, worker burnout continues to be a crisis at health care systems. But there are proven strategies that health systems can use to mitigate the physical and emotional depletion that their employees are suffering. This article offers five. They are derived from the authors’ interviews with health care leaders, their own collective experiences in quality improvement, critical care medicine, and physician leadership, and research on burnout that they and others have conducted.