Why should any of us care about physician burnout? What’s the big deal? Who likes their job anyway?

I’m an anesthesiologist, so I get interested in things that have to do with perioperative medicine. Today I want to take a peek at a paper that came out of Kaiser Permanente in June of 2023. They look at physician burnout in the perioperative space and its impacts on both healthcare workers and patients alike.

So why should you care? Consider the facts:

Physicians experiencing burnout admit to a greater likelihood of medical errors
Physicians who are burned out are less efficient
Globally, perioperative death is the 3rd most common cause of death, leading to an estimated 4.2 million deaths per year
Burnout in surgeons hovers around 60% and in anesthesiologists around 65% depending on which study you’re reading
Despite relentless improvement projects, little progress has been made to decrease rates of burnout

Physician burnout can potentially double the rates of patient safety events, and may contribute to 7-10% of serious medical mistakes. If we use malpractice data as a surrogate, higher surgeon burnout was correlated with more frequent medical malpractice suits. Malpractice suits then become a self-fulfilling prophecy, as physicians who have had a suit against them before are more likely to become burned out.

Clearly, it matters very much for patient safety to have a healthy and thriving workforce. Since the Covid pandemic, unfortunately, the opposite trend has occurred. More and more professionals are leaving healthcare behind completely as general working conditions have deteriorated while patient complexity continues to increase. Coupled with drug shortages and supply-chain issues, morale continues to suffer, mistakes are made, and patients are injured.

Most alarmingly, more physicians are leaving the field every year than are joining it. Estimated labor shortfalls across all specialties are 45,000-90,000. As our population continues to age and healthcare demand rises, everyone will be feeling the squeeze and access to care will suffer. It’s difficult to estimate the “cost” of early retirement and physicians leaving the field of medicine altogether, but a study in the Annals of Internal Medicine from 2019 put the figure at $4.6 Billion dollars A YEAR.

Who will care for us as we age? As a Gen X-er with Boomer parents, I think about this a lot, and hope that we as a profession can make some serious improvements before all of the physicians retire or find something else to do. We all deserve care.

Link to read full text of paper