As anyone with passing knowledge of the healthcare industry will tell you, burnout is one of the biggest problems facing the sector, with the high rates of employee turnover in the sector directly attributable to the high pressure environment people work in.
Far from tackling the problem, the issue in many ways seems to be getting worse, with staff reporting that things such as electronic medical records, and the often excessive note taking that comes with them, adding to the stress people work under.
Such stress is not just an economic issue however, but is also putting patients lives at risk. A new study from Stanford University suggests that physician burnout is as responsible for medical errors as unsafe medical workplace conditions.
“If we are trying to maximize the safety and quality of medical care, we must address the factors in the work environment that lead to burnout among our health care providers,” the researchers say.
The elephant in the room
The authors believe that there have been numerous initiatives over the years aiming to address issues that influence patient safety, but physician burnout has largely been ignored.
The research is one of the first attempts to understand the role physician burnout plays in the error rate in a hospital. The team sent surveys to several thousand physicians across the United States, with over half of them reporting symptoms of burnout. Candidly, roughly 10% of respondents also reported making an error in the past three months, which is a figure consistent with published research on the error rate.
“We found that physicians with burnout had more than twice the odds of self-reported medical error, after adjusting for specialty, work hours, fatigue, and work unit safety rating,” the authors say. “We also found that low safety grades in work units were associated with three to four times the odds of medical error.”
The results suggest that burnout level is as important to the safety of patients as the safety of the workplace itself. The findings come at a time when separate research suggests that around half of doctors suffer from signs of burnout. This manifests itself not just in unsafe practices, but also reduced quality of care and high turnover rates.
The authors argue that whilst many organizations invest substantial resources in improving safety in the workplace, few devote anywhere near as much to the numerous factors that result in burnout of physicians and nurses.
“We need a holistic and systems-based approach to address the epidemic of burnout among health care providers if we are truly going to create the high-quality health care system we aspire to,” they say.
