Rochester, Minn.-based Mayo Clinic recommended nine strategies for healthcare organizations to combat physician burnout, which impacts productivity, turnover rates and quality of care.
Tait Shanafelt, MD, Mayo Clinic's physician well-being program director, and John Noseworthy, MD, Mayo Clinic's president and CEO, outlined the strategies in Mayo Clinic Proceedings.
Here are the nine key strategies:
1. Acknowledge and assess the problem of physician burnout.
2. Recognize leader behaviors that fuel or diminish burnout.
3. Leverage a systems approach to establish targeted interventions for enhancing efficiency and decreasing clerical work.
4. Foster a strong community at work.
5. Incentivize with rewards, strategically.
6. Determine if your organization is demonstrating your values and mission in actions.
7. Implement organizational practices and policies, which promote flexibility and a work-life balance.
8. Equip employees with resources for self-care.
9. Support organizational science, by analyzing which institutional factors contribute to the problem. Then, invest in solutions.
"Professional exhaustion and disillusionment can adversely impact clinical performance, and result in medical errors and decreased quality of care. This situation hurts patients and providers, and we need to fix it," said Dr. Noseworthy.