Physician Burnout: Top 5 Effective Ways To Reduce It In 2022

Who is not stressed in this highly competitive world? Stress and work pressure are common words we are hearing in 2022.

It has become so common that people don’t sometimes take care of it, causing bigger problems in the future. The level will be always lesser in the past than in the present or future.

It cannot be avoided totally but can be handled well by ourselves and also with the help of experts. Burnout causes many problems in the lives of all people. But physician burnout especially impacts the well-being of patients, caregivers, and practices.

There are several arguments, studies and regulations made to reduce the burnout of physicians to increase their work satisfaction, experience, and achieve a work-life balance.

Often not all organizations and practices provide such a good atmosphere for their physicians to work with. And this creates friction between personnel and results in stressing physicians which could directly impact patients’ safety and the quality of care delivery.

Physician Burnout- What Is It?

According to a source, “burnout is a form of exhaustion caused by constantly feeling swamped. It’s a result of excessive and prolonged emotional, physical, and mental stress. In many cases, burnout is related to one’s job”.

Burnout happens when you are overwhelmed, emotionally drained, and unable to keep up with life’s incessant demands.

Physician burnout is the same thing that happens with physicians.

What Are The Causes For Physician Burnout?

We cannot just conclude that these alone cause burnout. More studies show that burnout can also be created by oneself rather than being affected by external factors.

We Saw The Causes And Now Let’s Look Into The Symptoms/Signs Of Burnout

Studying and researching burnout isn’t enough to overcome them. We need to find the causes and should know when to react to and deal with them using the following signs.

• You might be experiencing burnout if you feel exhausted
• If you feel like you do not feel enthusiastic and have negative feelings toward your work
• There might be times when you feel like you are unable to perform your job

The Top 5 Effective Ways To Reduce/Handle Physician Burnout In 2022

There are many pieces of research and studies being done to help physicians to cope with burnout. These points are given below when followed both on an individual and organizational level can bring out the adverse effects of burnout to control.

We present you the top 5 effective ways to manage and reduce physician burnout in 2022.

1. Creating a positive work environment helps

Health care organizations have a vitally important role in creating and maintaining positive work environments that clinicians find to be safe, healthy, and supportive and that foster ethical and meaningful practice, say reports.

To prevent and reduce burnout, these organizations must focus on redesigning their work systems on one side, and on the other, they should simultaneously encourage well-being.

The organization can work on improving the atmosphere of the workplace, can conduct engaging programs and activities to relax the staff, etc.

2. Technological burdens- should be cut down

The one thing that has constantly been developing in this era is technology. Technological development is the main source of all industries’ growth.

With the new inventions of the internet of things (IoT) and artificial intelligence (AI) technology in healthcare, the technological burden for physicians has been increasing lately.

Difficulties in sharing information among team members and poor integration into the workflow can become reasons for physician burnout. The advent of healthcare software platforms such as electronic health records (EHR), Practice Management, etc, which helps them to reduce manual work, creates the burden of handling them.

Handling this software needs professional training and time to invest in them. Time is again not to be found for physicians who work extra hours. Many physicians despite all the improvements in health IT designs, find these technologies to be confused sometimes and challenging.

The organization may want to collect feedback from the physicians about systems like electronic medical records (EMR). Because physicians often say that clerical tasks and technological burdens as the causes of burnout.

3. Reducing administrative burdens

The leading cause of burnout and the barrier to quality care turn out to be administrative burdens in the U.S. The regulations, policies, healthcare laws, and standards in the U.S. are so complex and being forced by many bodies.

The only problem in this process is that they don’t always allow the physicians to engage in the discussion. Their feedback can help the entities to alter some to avoid burnout.

The need for increased care coordination is important when it comes to the management of physician burnouts. Tasks like non-clinical which are associated with care coordination can add to the workload of the clinical team.

A great solution for this problem is using a non-clinical team to carefully coordinate care, connect patients with community resources, and complete the non-clinical outreach requirements of value-based care. This allows the clinical team to focus on clinical care alone.

4. Extending support to clinicians/physicians

Finding the causes and talking about them won’t solve problems. It needs action. Listening to the physicians and getting feedback on their issues alone doesn’t help organizations to find solutions for burnout.

Then what should they do? Let us answer that question. They should provide both mental and physical support to the clinicians and learners. Keeping physicians’ emotional and mental health well cherished is always very important.

Many physicians don’t even know that they are suffering from burnout. There should be people arranged for speaking with them. Private counseling sessions must be arranged for them at least once every 3 months.

Privacy must be ensured for them to come up and talk more freely without any hesitations.

Barriers to help-seeking must be eliminated as they are vital for improving the well-being of the physician and reducing burnout.

5. Invest in personal activities

Last but not least method or way to reduce physician burnout is by immersing themselves in some physical and mindfulness activities.

Physical activities have been proven to be stress busters. A simple run or a walk can make you feel relaxed and distracted from the burdens. Even yoga is becoming extremely popular among workers.

Developing hobbies, going out with friends and family, singing out, reading books, meditating, spending time in the museum, hitting the gym, etc, are good ways to be happy and relaxed.

These can be done alone. However, these activities when combined with a partner, family members, or friends, create social interactions that can contribute well to the relaxed nature of these activities.

Final Touch

Burnout can be the reason for a physician’s personal and professional lives, and it might get out of hand when not treated properly. 

Patients’ safety is in the hands of physicians. And because of that, organizations and legal bodies force physicians/clinicians to follow strict rules and regulations promptly. But the problems and issues faced by these people must be regarded as important by the entities.

Everyone coming together to talk about these issues may be impossible. But start doing that in smaller ways can somehow reap sweeter results in the future.

We at Vozo can reduce your burnout due to using healthcare software. Our systematic and sophisticated EHR and Practice Management (PM) software work easily according to your need. 

Our customized EHR workflow and chart forms enable you to ease of use with a great level of timely accuracy and also reduce manual work with unwanted wait time. And our end-to-end Practice Management solution suite empowers physicians to work smarter, not harder.

Don’t think hard and get stressed. Visit our website now to know more about our products.

“Let’s make your practice and life easier and stress-free, together”