Taking Action Against Clinician Burnout: A Systems Approach to Professional Well-Being

Patient-centered, high-quality health care relies on the well-being, health, and safety of health care clinicians. However, alarmingly high rates of clinician burnout in the United States are detrimental to the quality of care being provided, harmful to individuals in the workforce, and costly. It is important to take a systemic approach to address burnout that focuses on the structure, organization, and culture of health care.

Taking Action Against Clinician Burnout: A Systems Approach to Professional Well-Being builds upon two groundbreaking reports from the past twenty years, To Err Is Human: Building a Safer Health System and Crossing the Quality Chasm: A New Health System for the 21st Century, which both called attention to the issues around patient safety and quality of care. This report explores the extent, consequences, and contributing factors of clinician burnout and provides a framework for a systems approach to clinician burnout and professional well-being, a research agenda to advance clinician well-being, and recommendations for the field.

• Front Matter
• Summary
• 1 Introduction
• 2 A Framework for a Systems Approach to Clinician Burnout and Professional Well-Being
• 3 Extent and Consequences of Clinician Burnout
• 4 Factors Contributing to Clinician Burnout and Professional Well-Being
• 5 Healthy and Safe Health Care Organizations
• 6 The Influence of the External Environment on Clinician Burnout and Professional Well-Being
• 7 Health Information Technology
• 8 Student and Trainee Burnout and Professional Well-Being
• 9 A Research Agenda to Advance Clinician Professional Well-Being
• 10 Conclusions and Recommendations
• Appendix A: Committee and Staff Biographies
• Appendix B: Medicare Program, The Joint Commission, and International Classification of Diseases, Tenth Revision, Clinical Documentation and Coding Requirements