UMEM Educational Pearls

Title: Promoting Wellbeing Among the Physician Workforce

Keywords: Burnout, Wellbeing, Workforce (PubMed Search)

Posted: 1/22/2025 by Mercedes Torres, MD (Updated: 3/25/2025)
Click here to contact Mercedes Torres, MD

On March 18, 2022, Congress passed the Dr. Lorna Breen Health Care Provider Protection Act, named after an emergency medicine physician who died by suicide during the pandemic. This landmark legislation allocated $103 million across 45 organizations to introduce evidence-based measures to mitigate and prevent burnout.

As a result, the Impact Wellbeing Guide was developed, outlining the six key evidence-based action steps for organization leaders to address health care workers’ professional well-being listed below:

Conduct a review of your hospital’s operations to determine how they support professional wellbeing.
Build a dedicated team to support professional wellbeing at your hospital.
Break down barriers to seeking help, such as updating and removing intrusive mental health questions on credentialing applications and offering confidential mental health support options.
Develop a suite of communication tools that help you share updates with your workforce about your hospital’s journey to improve professional wellbeing.
Integrate professional wellbeing into an existing quality improvement project at your hospital.
Create a 12-month plan to continue to move your workforce’s professional wellbeing work forward.

The Guide is designed to help hospital leaders and executives accelerate or supplement professional wellbeing work in their hospitals at the operational level.

A PDF of the full guide is available from the CDC: https://www.cdc.gov/niosh/docs/2024-109/

References

https://www.cdc.gov/niosh/healthcare/impactwellbeingguide/

Bock A. To Fix Burnout, New Initiatives Go Beyond Worker Resilience and Put Onus on Health Systems. JAMA. 2024;331(24):2067–2069. doi:10.1001/jama.2024.6216