Across all disciplines, doctor burnout has been associated with decreased quality of patient care and safety, according to a new reports.
The comprehensive review suggested that there is a “consistent relationship” between elevated levels of provider burnout and lower levels of both patient treatment quality and overall safety.
“Even though the effect sizes were close to medium range, that provider well-being and their level of burnout could have a relationship with quality of care and safety at even that level I think was surprising,” said study investigator Michelle P. Salyers, PhD, of the Department of Psychology, Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis. “We do need to pay attention to our treatment providers not only just for humanity’s sake but because it may also relate to other goals of having high quality of care and satisfied patients and reduced errors or safety problems. This study gives extra rationale for taking care of our care providers. You want your providers to be happy and performing well and to stay and be good employees.”
Doctor Burnout Implications
The study, recently published in the Journal of General Internal Medicine, investigated the relationship between provider burnout, treatment quality and patient safety. To get a better understanding of how these factors were related, researchers conducted a meta-analysis of more than 210,000 healthcare providers across a wide variety of disciplines. What they found is that there was a statistically significant negative relationship between doctor burnout and both quality of treatment and patient safety.
“In both cases, the negative relationship implies that greater burnout among healthcare providers is associated with poorer quality healthcare and decreased safety for patients,” the authors wrote.
According to the study, the quality of care a patient receives between a healthy doctor and a burned out doctor is about a 7% difference, while safety varies about 5% between the two types of doctors. Despite the findings, the researchers noted that the results were correlational, not causational, and they cautioned against jumping to any conclusions about the findings.
“A meta-analysis allows you to look across multiple studies and test more consistency of findings and provide an overall summary of how strong the relationship is,” said Dr Salyers. “Still, this is all correlational, so we don’t know whether provider burnout makes quality worse or working in a setting that has more patient safety problems leads providers to feel overwhelmed at work.”
So although the results don’t prove that one factor causes the other, it’s worth noting that physician burnout and the quality of care they deliver are closely connected. We need to make sure our doctors maintain an adequate work-life balance so they can provide the best care for their patients.