Abstract
[This is an excerpt.] Before the COVID-19 pandemic and going as far back as the Harvard Medical Practice Study,1 it has been common to hear leaders lament the seemingly tedious discussions about health care worker (HCW) burnout and work-life integration. Fast forward post pandemic and it is hard to imagine a leader who is not routinely discussing workforce well-being. How are leaders supposed to navigate these new well-being responsibilities? In this issue of Mayo Clinic Proceedings, Hurtado and colleagues2 offer some empirical insights to inform well-being leadership efforts, saying that the burden of emotional exhaustion management “often falls back on clinic leaders who desperately need urgent guidance to implement swift, low-effort, practical and meaningful strategies to manage an afflicted workforce.” We agree. This has been our experience at Duke Health and across hundreds of US hospitals in which we have surveyed safety culture and workforce well-being since the start of the global health crisis. What leaders want and need right now are specific actions to help recover from pandemic exhaustion, to rebuild trust—and by the way, whatever that entails, it needs to be quick and fit into increasingly shrinking budgets. Furthermore, this is against a backdrop of growing numbers of frustrated HCWs adopting the refrain “Just fix the system!” as their exhaustion worsens. Meanwhile, frustrated health care leaders manage the combination of financial constraints and workforce challenges as a gordian knot, consuming all energy while too complex to be untied. Currently, there are few system fixes that are broadly applicable across all of health care, but Hurtado et al are shining a light on one with broad potential. [To read more, click View Resource.]
