Healthcare professionals put patients first every day. Now is the time to make their well-being a priority.
Stress, overwork, understaffing, burnout: it’s like a list of prescription side effects. But for a significant portion of healthcare workers, these labels are much more than that.
These are the lived experiences of the doctors, nurses, and staff who put lives in their hands every day.
We cannot ignore the health of healthcare workers.
“We are in a profession where 100% of our work is putting others before ourselves,” said Dawn Moore, RN, senior director of case management services at Genex Services.
Noble: Yes. And in a world where modern medicine has the ability to treat diseases and eliminate diseases, medical professionals are an important part of our society. But when employee needs are not prioritized in the same way as patient needs, it can lead to misdiagnosis, malpractice lawsuits, employee injuries, and more.
Fortunately, risk management and insurance are at stake.
Understanding stress factors for healthcare workers
To fully grasp the severity of the situation, you need to review where the stressor came from and why it happened.
Moore divided stressors into three buckets: work, personal, and the balance between the two.
“Global qualitative nursing research “About 49% of health care workers’ stressors are at work and 32% come from stressors in their personal lives, with about 19% of them intersecting between the two,” she shared.
In the workplace, providers are under pressure to do things right. Each patient has unique care needs and a unique personality that you must accommodate. Healthcare workers must adhere to facility policies, administer appropriate doses of medications, and have exemplary bedside manners during odd-hour shifts and even during maximum shifts. It won’t. 80 hour work week.
Dawn Moore, RN, Senior Director, Case Management Services, Genex Services
Frighteningly, many people are assuming these responsibilities Shortage of manpower.
“There is a shortage of health care workers. And when there is a shortage, there can be a cycle of stress. When workers are stressed out, they end up leaving the field or being forced to leave the field in some cases. “This will perpetuate the shortage of workers,” said John Libertino, executive vice president. President and Medical Director of QBE North America.
Duquesne University School of Nursing report As early as next year, or 2025, there will be a shortage of more than 400,000 home health aides and 29,400 nurses.Association of American Medical Colleges prediction There will be a shortage of 124,000 doctors over the next 10 years.
Reducing the number of doctors and other health care workers on-site could mean longer wait times for patients and exacerbate the stress on health care workers who must act as the face of patients’ care. . dissatisfied patient.
And dissatisfied patients represent another formidable stressor for health care workers. “We’re seeing a significant increase in workplace violence in the healthcare field,” said Dennis Cook, president of Liberty Mutual Healthcare and Ironshore Healthcare. “We’ve seen it from patients, we’ve seen it from their families, and we’ve seen it from our colleagues.”
workplace violence According to a 2023 review of the field by Liberty Mutual, it ranks among the top five causes of injury for healthcare workers. In total, 6.8% of injuries in medical settings The injury was the result of intentional injury by another person.
“Within the healthcare industry, this is one thing.” [risk] It’s on the rise,” Cook explained.
“Health care workers are dealing with stress through patients facing life-or-death situations…We have seen an increase in patient-to-staff violence, but also an increase in staff-to-staff violence. There is no single reason for the increase, but it may be due to a combination of work stress and mental health issues.”
Another way patients and their families increase stress is through threats, such as: medical malpractice lawsuit. For healthcare workers, the pressure to perform can increase as even the smallest mistake on the job can cost someone their life. Accidents, misdiagnosis, unintentional medical errors, and delays in treatment can be serious professional liability issues that healthcare facilities can face.
Needless to say, even the perception that care was inadequate can lead to litigation.
on average 20,000 medical malpractice lawsuits Lawsuits are filed against doctors every year in the United States. The American Medical Association reports that one in three doctors’ girlfriends are likely to be sued at some point in their career, even if the claim ends up causing damages. It means. No fault or negligence will be accepted.
“From an insurance perspective, social inflation It has something to do with this,” Livatino said. “Very aggressive plaintiff’s attorneys will go after these medical professionals using so-called reptilian theory, which exploits the human instinct to detect dangerous situations. Lawyers will bring medical incidents to juries. I will use this as a wake-up call and example.”
From there, plaintiffs’ lawyers can use the jury’s sense of justice to reach larger verdicts, each reaching billions of dollars.
Beyond patient care, the work of hospitals and medical facilities can pose additional stressors for these professionals.
“There are many mergers and acquisitions The work continues,” Cook said.
This is not a new stressor, but rather an ongoing stressor, according to a Reuters survey. Power up in 2024.
“Who is your employer today may not be your employer tomorrow, which means that in addition to their normal responsibilities, healthcare professionals must stay abreast of changes in processes, procedures, and technology.” It means there is a need,” Cook said.
The wake of the pandemic
Suffice it to say, burnout in medical settings is very real. It would be remiss to not mention the gigantic coronavirus-sized elephant in the room and how it has changed the landscape of the profession.
Before the pandemic, “our medical community wasn’t taking good care of themselves,” Moore said. “Then suddenly there is a pandemic. The workload increases, the burnout increases, the work becomes more difficult.
“When the pandemic started, I have some really good friends in clinical settings and they had to be completely stocked with PPE every day,” she shared. “It wasn’t just showing up for work. In fact, it was showing up early, preparing and changing. Some nurses couldn’t even see their families because of the forced isolation situation; Family and work-life balance were becoming difficult. The pandemic clearly exacerbated health worker burnout at a time when we were already facing challenges.”
Dennis Cook, President of Liberty Mutual Healthcare and Ironshore Healthcare
“The pandemic is putting tremendous stress on the entire health care system,” Cook added. “For a short period of time, everyone rallied around these workers and really tried to support them. But it probably didn’t last as long as it should have.”
Above million dead In the United States alone, COVID-19 has put health care workers on the front lines during a time of great uncertainty. It’s hard to remember a time before vaccines were widely available, but in the months of March 2020 and early 2021, many healthcare workers were asked to risk their lives for an unprecedented disease. I was there.
Procedures changed daily. A protocol that adapts to information coming in from any source. Working from home has been an option for many professions, but not in the medical field.
Many persevered and came out the other side. Many professionals have left the field entirely. (According to research, more than 230,000 people) The Definitive Healthcare Report. )
hope is not lost
The number of stressors faced by healthcare workers paints a bleak picture, but that is not the whole picture.
Risk management and insurance already play a role in the fight against burnout among health care workers. It starts with recognition and recognition of the burdens these professionals face, and ends with practical tools such as new technology and better benefits, demonstrating that we are actively taking steps to help. .
“Several third-party risk management companies already offer hotlines, publish content, and conduct assessments and research to provide support and content to answer questions in this industry,” Libertino said. said.
Employee surveys on mental health and well-being can go a long way in getting a baseline assessment of workers’ attitudes towards work, whether they feel undervalued and whether mental health initiatives are important to them. Masu.
“Even before the pandemic, there was already a negative stigma around being able to talk freely about mental health. The pandemic has given our experts the opportunity to have a more viable discussion on this topic. He gave it to me,” Moore said.
She added that since 2020, as someone who supervises nurse case managers, she has done more to talk about and address worker mental health.
Related article: Healthcare students need mental health resources.Insurance can help
“Over the past three years, I’ve been doing more research, having more discussions, making sure we’re on top of our morale and showing these people that we care about what’s going on. “I’ve been trying,” she said.
Wellness programs aimed at addressing the mental health and well-being of employees are also a strategy many are adopting, especially after the onset of COVID-19.
“Our organization is well aware of this issue and is working to reduce the risk of infection by increasing support for employees, such as wellness programs and increased time off. It might be working with insurance companies to come up with risk mitigation strategies,” Cook said.
He noted that telemedicine is just one way to reduce the workload and pressure faced by health care providers, noting that “more telemedicine will be used to alleviate the burden of staffing shortages. ”, he said.
Insurance companies can also help by providing quality claims processing that works to offset the stress factors associated with litigation. As Livatino explained, “Providing a high-quality claims process that works to offset the assertiveness of plaintiff’s courts and social inflation will help reduce stress for health care providers.” This could be one of the roles of insurance in
“As health care providers, we say we are the worst patients,” Moore quipped. “We are the best at telling others how to care for themselves, how to follow a treatment plan, and what to do to get healthy. But health care providers often find themselves in trouble I’m trying to figure it out myself.”
Recognizing this fact, risk teams must work to create an environment that fosters employee well-being. In providing a safe space to not only talk about mental health and well-being, but to address it, executives are reminding healthcare workers that they often do so for those of us in their care. In the same way, we encourage people to put their own needs first. &
