From addressing clinician suicide to destigmatizing mental health care, the recently released draft of the National Academy of Medicine’s (NAM) National Plan for health workforce well-being provides a blueprint for long-overdue systems’ change. While COVID-19 exacerbated mental health challenges and burnout among health care providers, problems existed long before the pandemic. For example, a study published in Anesthesiology just prior to the first wave found 59% of physician anesthesiologists were at high risk for burnout. As frontline workers during the pandemic, anesthesiologists are at even greater risk now.
The lead researcher of that study, Amy Vinson, M.D., F.A.A.P., has been dedicated to improving physician well-being for more than a decade. As the American Society of Anesthesiologists’ (ASA) representative for the NAM Collaborative on Clinician Well-being and Resilience, she notes the draft plan provides much-needed pragmatic recommendations for systems, policy and organizational change. The plan is a pivot from focusing on improving individual resilience which, although helpful in some cases, doesn’t address the root causes of the problem.
Public comment on the draft plan is due Friday.
As chair of ASA’s Committee on Physician Well-Being, Dr. Vinson is available to discuss:
- Implementing strategies for reducing the amount of time clinicians spend on documentation, such as electronic health record modifications and reducing regulatory barriers. These changes can improve clinician morale by enabling them to spend more time doing what they went into medicine to do – care for patients.
- Destigmatizing mental health care, including passing state safe-haven laws and medical licensure improvements to ensure health providers aren’t punished for getting the care they need.
- Recruiting and retaining the workforce to increase diversity.
- Creating a culture of well-being and how the ASA is focusing on this for anesthesiologists.
- Applying the creative mindset of doing things differently, which clinicians learned during COVID-19, to help create seismic change in the culture of medicine.
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