Creating and continuing a culture of well-being and mental health care for the healthcare staff is a powerful tool for not only helping residents but attracting and retaining employees, says the National Academy of Medicine in the National Plan for Health Workforce Well-Being it released Tuesday.
The plan was sparked by healthcare’s burnout epidemic, which has resulted in employee flight and poorer resident care. The vision of the plan is that people, including long-term care residents, will be cared for by a health workforce that is thriving in an environment that fosters their well-being as they improve population health, enhance the care experience, reduce costs and advance health equity.
In the United States, 54% of nurses and physicians, 60% of medical students and residents, and 61% of pharmacists had symptoms of burnout before the pandemic, according to NAM data.
The pandemic exacerbated it; a Mental Health America survey of 1,119 healthcare workers from June to September 2020 found that 82% of the respondents reported emotional exhaustion and 68% reported physical exhaustion. Nearly half the nurses who responded said they had too little emotional support.
Perhaps worst of all, the experience is driving away talent. In the first year of the pandemic, driven by burnout, nearly 24% of the more than 9,000 physicians from various disciplines in the study and 40% of about 2300 nurses planned to leave their practice in the next two years, according to the American Medical Association-funded Coping With COVID study.
NAM’s strategy to prevent burnout and address it when it can’t be avoided has seven parts and can work in long-term care settings:
- Create and sustain positive work and learning environments and culture. Transform health systems, and health education and training, by prioritizing and investing in efforts to optimize environments that prevent and reduce burnout, foster professional well-being, and support quality care.
- Invest in measurement, assessment, strategies, and research. Expand the uptake of existing tools at the health system level and advance national research on decreasing health worker burnout and improving well-being.
- Support mental health and reduce stigma. Provide support to health workers by eliminating barriers and reducing stigma associated with seeking services needed to address mental health challenges.
- Address compliance, regulatory, and policy barriers for daily work. Prevent and reduce the unnecessary burdens that stem from laws, regulations, policies, and standards placed on health workers.
- Engage effective technology tools. Optimize and expand the use of health information technologies that support health workers in providing high-quality patient care and serving population health, and minimize technologies that inhibit clinical decision-making or add to administrative burden.
- Institutionalize well-being as a long-term value. Ensure COVID-19 recovery efforts address the toll on health worker well-being now and in the future, and bolster the public health and health care systems for future emergencies.
- Recruit and retain a diverse and inclusive health workforce. Promote careers in the health professions and increase pathways and systems for a diverse, inclusive, and thriving workforce.
The plan “provides a roadmap for the nation to set forth the priority areas, action steps, and actors who must work collectively to achieve a system where the health workforce is thriving in an environment that fosters their well-being,” said NAM president Victor Dzau, MD.
“Collective action is urgently needed to prevent a dissolution of the health professions and to ensure a strong and interconnected health system for the nation,” the report said. “Health workers have been operating in a survival state for a long time, but change is possible.”
