Clinicians felt isolated and disconnected from life outside work during the second year of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the frontline workers reported depleting motivation levels, a new study suggests.
Between Dec. 28, 2020, and Dec. 9, 2021, researchers from universities and health systems in Seattle, Minneapolis and Canada interviewed 23 clinicians. The interviews revealed an overload of work during a tumultuous time as clinicians said they felt a lack of system-level support for "the operationally- and ethically-complex situations that fell to them," the June 16 study published in JAMA found.
Months after an official declaration of a public health emergency — which the study participants said did little to help with allocating resources — clinicians said their "strong sense of mission, duty and purpose" during the early days of the pandemic "was eroded by unsatisfying clinical roles, misalignment between clinicians' own values and institutional goals, more distant relationships with patients, and moral distress."
The first theme found from the interviews, isolation, was defined as a "disconnect between what is said from administrative people and what is experienced on the ground," the researchers wrote, "which could leave clinicians feeling unsupported, 'dismissed,' or even 'gaslit' by leadership."
Clinicians also shared frustrations of being forced into more responsibility over in-the-moment decision-making despite not having the official leadership power to do so.
The researchers concluded that it's vital for frontline clinicians to have a say in institutional operations and pre-crisis planning.