Doctors and nurses are under more pressure now more than ever to perform at their best, but many simply aren’t given the right support to meet those expectations. When they voice concerns, they want leadership that respects them, knows they aren’t complaining just to be difficult and most importantly, acts decisively and quickly to improve the situation.
Nurses and doctors often point to three key non-salary factors that would help them better care for patients and ultimately stay in their roles longer. These include stronger communication and support from leadership, predictable and equitable scheduling, and reduced non-clinical admin work. These day-to-day issues on inpatient floors are directly responsible for rising rates of clinician burnout, exacerbating the serious shortage of doctors and nurses facing the US in the next decade.
Still, there is cause for optimism: The driving forces behind burnout are no mystery. In fact, clinicians are telling us exactly what those problems are — and what healthcare leaders can do to fix them.
They’re looking for an understanding of their schedule and workload
According to a 2022 report from the American Hospital Association, patient acuity has intensified in the years following the Covid-19 pandemic. This means that patients are coming to clinicians sicker and with more complex medical needs. Yet, patient acuity is not currently reflected in clinicians’ schedules — they’re as full as ever.
Additionally, fatigue from intense shifts can linger for days or weeks, and scheduling practices frequently miss the mark on recognizing personal commitments and factors like patient continuity of care. Burnout is inevitable when scheduling is divorced from these realities of care and life outside the hospital, but clinicians regularly find themselves working around unpredictable and unbalanced scheduling practices.
Schedules tell clinicians when they’ll be on shift, but they’re also the framework they use to build and plan the rest of their lives. Getting them right makes a tremendous difference with patient care and job satisfaction, while getting them wrong can impact the entire continuum of care.
Unfortunately, scheduling in healthcare still has a long way to go. For example, there are still plenty of hospital departments whose operations would go awry if that one vital sticky note with information about a few last-minute shift changes dropped off the bulletin board.
Instead of relying on Excel or pen and paper, it’s time for healthcare scheduling to catch up with the times. If you can’t effectively manage the complexity and the moving parts, your clinicians will suffer.
They need better communication on the floor
The challenges with operations don’t stop at scheduling. For clinicians working on the hospital floor, delays in call and message responses complicate communication and make it harder to connect with the right person. That’s annoying when the question at hand is routine and extremely dangerous in an emergent situation.
Beyond impacting operation efficiency, communication issues also extend into patient well-being. According to research from the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), poor communication between healthcare practitioners can result in “misunderstandings that lead to medical errors through misdiagnosis or suboptimal treatments,” especially during handoffs when critical information is lost.
The underlying reasons for poor communication during handoffs are varied. For some, it might be a matter of missing or incomplete documentation. For others, tech access or platform issues pop up during transitions that make it difficult to achieve true shared understanding about the patient’s care. And then there’s the issue of accountability that can arise from this broader confusion: Many providers feel that a lack of ownership over patient handoffs creates yet another point of friction.
Communication touches almost every workflow in the hospital in some way. When it’s not working right, patient care can easily be delayed, and providers are burdened with extra cognitive load while they try to figure things out. In a situation where mere seconds can be the difference between a good and bad outcome, that’s a big risk.
Unsurprisingly, better communication is also needed to ease and improve care transitions. Patient care is an inherently high-risk activity that often carries lots of unpredictability, so we need to give clinicians a much less overwhelming and frustrating communication experience that ditches fragmented pathways, poor access, and inconsistent documentation.
One of the culprits here is likely the availability of so many communication pathways. Most hospitals probably have a mix of phones, pagers, and secure messaging apps, and clinicians often struggle to determine which method is best for any given clinical scenario. We need to ease this friction, either by giving clinicians a single communication platform or integrating the ones they’ve got so they can communicate faster.
They’re asking for operational wellness as a daily practice
When health leaders ignore operational wellness, it’s clinicians who pay the price. While interest in physician wellbeing has increased in recent years, especially following extreme levels of stress during the Covid-19 pandemic, the fact remains that doctors and nurses in these environments commonly struggle with mental health issues.
The emotional and physical strain of making do (or trying to make do) with subpar systems and processes can drag down provider job satisfaction, accelerate burnout and even impact the quality of care they provide to patients. Not because they don’t care, but because one can only stay ahead of dysfunction and burnout for so long before something breaks.
Clinicians are asking for more staff during critical times, clearer communication workflows, and less administrative burden during their shifts. These are reasonable requests, an observation which is itself beside the main point: When clinicians can spend less time fighting tech, figuring out workarounds for faulty processes, and handling non-clinical tasks, it follows that they can spend more time on direct patient care.
What your clinicians wish you knew
Despite so much research that reveals the true impact of these operational issues, many clinicians aren’t given the opportunity to voice their concerns — and even if they are, leadership isn’t necessarily making changes.
When staff members share feedback about issues such as staffing, communication and scheduling, they cannot be ignored — what they’re looking for is meaningful change.
This reality hits retention, which hits the bottom line, and it also makes clinicians less likely to surface smaller issues that may become bigger ones if left unaddressed.
So here’s the real headline: Ignore clinician wellness at your own risk
Clinicians are sounding the alarm. Despite being overworked and under-resourced, they’re constantly asked to be the glue that holds day-to-day operations together.
Listen to the people taking care of your patients. Burnout is not a sustainable working posture, and it’s time we channel their feedback into finding real solutions.
Photo: PeopleImages, Getty Images
Guillaume Castel was named CEO of PerfectServe in 2019. Since then, Castel has helped shape the company’s future as a purveyor of technology that accelerates speed to care by optimizing provider schedules, streamlining clinical communication, and engaging patients and their families in the care experience. He has over 20 years of experience in strategy, business development, finance, and operations across the technology and healthcare industries.
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