Burnout and stress have been common problems in the healthcare industry for many years, but emotional exhaustion among healthcare workers, and nurses in particular, increased significantly during the COVID-19 pandemic, new research has found.
A new study, Emotional Exhaustion Among U.S. Health Care Workers Before and During the COVID-19 Pandemic, 2019-2021, evaluated emotional exhaustion of healthcare workers from September 2019 through January 2022. The study, led by Duke University Health researchers, found emotional exhaustion, used to measure burnout and emotional well-being of healthcare workers, increased from 32% before the beginning of the pandemic to 40% by January 2022.
“This large-scale survey study of healthcare workers spanning three years offers substantial evidence that emotional exhaustion trajectories varied by role but have increased overall and among most HCW roles since the onset of the pandemic,” the study’s authors wrote.
Researchers conducted three waves of electronic surveys of more than 30,000 healthcare workers at 76 community hospitals from two large U.S. health care systems in September 2019, September 2020 and from September 2021 through January 2022. Workers surveyed included nurses, physicians, administrators and support staff.
Nurses reported particularly high levels of emotional exhaustion in the surveys, starting at 40.6% in 2019, increasing to 46.5% in 2020 and increasing again during the second year of the pandemic to 49.2%. Other healthcare workers, including physicians, reported similar patterns to nurses but at somewhat lower levels.
The findings suggest that employers may need to reevaluate their existing wellness programs and provide more resources to help reduce employee stress and burnout.
“These results suggest that current HCW well-being resources and programs may be inadequate and even more difficult to use owing to lower workforce capacity and motivation to initiate and complete well-being interventions,” the authors wrote.
“We now know that burnout is a parallel pandemic that will be felt for many years to come,” said lead author Bryan Sexton, PhD, director of the Duke Center for Healthcare Safety and Quality, in an article in MedicalXpress about the study. “Leaders need tiered options for responding to this issue, and we suggest that there is a need for both institutional and individual resources for health care well-being, as evidenced by the role-specific findings reported in our study.”
The study appeared in the Sept. 21 edition of the JAMA Network Open.
