Cigna HealthcareSM has sponsored and provided editorial input on this article.
Healthcare workers are experiencing unprecedented levels of burnout and cognitive fatigue. This is draining their enthusiasm for work and affecting their mental health, while also hurting organizations by increasing employee turnover and absenteeism.
During Becker's Hospital Review's 13th Annual Meeting, in a workshop sponsored by Cigna Healthcare, Eric Stotlar, network lead for the Midwest region at Cigna Healthcare, moderated a discussion with a panel of experts who highlighted learnings and strategies their organizations have put in place to help restore the vitality of clinicians and other healthcare workers. Panelists were:
- Rob Cetti, president, CareAllies®
- Andrea Clifford, director of employee health and well‐being, Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children's Hospital of Chicago
- Stuart Lustig, MD, national medical executive for provider partnerships, EvernorthSM Health Services
Four key takeaways were:
1. The shifts happening in healthcare are sucking the vitality out of its workforce. "Whether that's physician burnout, whether that's back‐office turnover, whether that's physician assistants being poached by another system or another group, we're experiencing all of it," Mr. Cetti said. He added that these workforce shifts, which are further aggravated by clinicians reassessing their attitudes toward work‐life balance after the COVID‐19 pandemic, are having an impact on the cost and capacity structures of many of the independent physician practices CareAllies serves.
2. Vitality is an academic construct with a specific meaning. Dr. Lustig explained that the concept of vitality has been around for about 25 years and has three main components: competence, relatedness and intentionality to pursue life. It spans multiple dimensions of health, such as physical, emotional, financial, spiritual and community health. "It's a global measure of health and well‐being," he said. Dr. Lustig added that the construct of vitality has gained so much relevancy in recent years that researchers have been looking at it as a preventive measure for burnout in academic institutions.
3. To put vitality and joy back into the practice of medicine, organizations must simplify requirements. As an increasing number of provider organizations and health plans enter value‐ based arrangements, they are putting more requirements on clinicians, driven by the desire to make those arrangements successful. This is elevating cognitive and administrative burden, without compensatory measures.
To reduce that burden and revitalize their workforce, organizations must simplify things. Mr. Cetti said an effective way to achieve this is to consider what can be taken away each time a new requirement or process is added to a workflow. A complementary approach is to build workflows around the needs of patients, not around IT platforms or staffing models. "If you can instill a culture that is surrounded by joy and seeing a smile on a patient's face, that's what makes healthcare fun."
4. Supporting employee mental health on‐ and off‐premise is essential. The first step to supporting colleagues in distress is learning to recognize the signs. Ms. Clifford said being able to identify when someone is suffering is an especially important part of leaders' responsibilities.
The next step is for leaders to know how to offer help. "It's ok to not be ok — here are our resources," is a good way to reassure a distressed team member, Ms. Clifford explained. Of course, such a response must be grounded in actual resources being available. At Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital, Ms. Clifford's department worked with the communications team to build a well‐being web portal accessible via QR code, so that in a critical moment employees can scan the code to access information instead of trying to remember log‐in credentials for the hospital intranet.
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