Creating a Resilient Workplace

BY ANNE GESKE

THE DATA ARE CLEAR: there’s an upward trend of burnout in medicine, particularly among physicians, who experience professional burnout at twice the rate of the general population. 1 Burnout isn’t just a problem—it’s a crisis. It affects patient safety, teams and organizations—and it’s costly.

So, there’s been a lot of attention on individual resiliency skills of late. But the primary drivers of burnout occur at an organizational level, so focusing solely on what individuals can do to manage stress will fall woefully short. Organizational issues include high workloads, inefficiencies related to electronic health records (EHRs), loss of meaning and social isolation at work, and loss of clinical autonomy. 2,3

The stakes are high because physicians and other clinicians are voting with their feet, according to Dr. Laurie Drill-Mellum, chief medical officer of Constellation/MMIC. “Millennials stay two to four years in an organization, on average,” she says. “If they aren’t engaged in being part of something greater than themselves, if they aren’t seen for what they can contribute, they aren’t staying. The workforce shortage plays in this, too. If we don’t treat people differently, we’re going to have to close our doors.”

Dr. Drill-Mellum’s work focuses on clinician well-being and its effect on patients and organizations. As an officer of a professional liability insurance company, she knows that clinicians who are burned out are at risk of making medical errors and therefore at risk of getting sued. And she sees the organizational drivers of burnout as eminently solvable.