Clinician well-being has often focused solely on the individual through “burnout” or “resiliency” training because participation and completion can be tracked. While these programs can be helpful, they often ring false or incomplete when not accompanied by systemic changes.
Clinician professional well-being initiatives should encompass personal wellness techniques and tie organizational, systemwide and policy improvements together with clinician-centered interventions.
To support clinicians’ professional well-being, Envision Healthcare recommends the following organizational, healthcare system and policy improvements:
1. Enhancing Practice Flexibility
To support well-being and mitigate burnout, clinicians’ practice schedules should emphasize flexibility to accommodate life events, such as childbirth, bereavement and sick leave. Additionally, scheduling should be flexible to support all parents, regardless of gender, throughout their children’s lives. During career transitions and wind-downs, credentialing and practice flexibility can support clinicians as they shift into alternative roles. One example is providing care via virtual health. Overall, scheduling and clinical load must accommodate and account for fatigue to protect clinicians and patients.
2. Fostering a Supportive and Inclusive Practice Culture
Clinician well-being can be fostered through workplace onboarding, practice resources, clinical updates, mentorship programs, introductions to allies and career advancement and growth. Additionally, practices should offer benefits and scheduling that support well-being. It is important to hire, train and retain skilled individuals who lead by example when it comes to prioritizing well-being-based activities — flexible scheduling, taking vacations and focusing on personal care — and encourage their teams to do the same. For example, promoting women into leadership roles helps provide opportunities for role modeling and mentoring for other women.
3. Developing and Implementing Peer Support Programs
Peers offer camaraderie and support in the face of adverse events, family events and shift coverage needs. These programs can vary depending on clinicians and practice needs. They can be in various forms, including informal gatherings to share stories or more formal debriefings on traumatic events. Additionally, Patient Safety Organizations (PSO) and peer review protections should be extended to cover peer support and professional well-being activities.
4. Providing Mental Health and Professional Well-Being Education
Clinicians and practices must be better educated on the importance of mental healthcare. Overall, supporting professional well-being through education will require a unified approach between clinicians, healthcare organizations and public health organizations.
5. Using Thoughtful and Intentional Quality Metrics
Employee incentives, such as quality and patient satisfaction programs, should be aligned with metrics that clinicians can control. An example of this is to evaluate patient experience verbatims from patients in the context of the care given.
6. Updating Licensing and Credentialing Mental Health Questions
Envision, alongside the Dr. Lorna Breen Heroes’ Foundation, has been advocating for licensing and credentialing updates. As of July 2023, 21 states no longer require physicians to answer questions about mental health or substance abuse when applying for a license.
7. Providing Additional Support and Protection for Parents
As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, support systems to help with child-rearing have crumbled and need to be rebuilt. The pandemic has also placed a greater emphasis on how important it is to have adequate parental leave to raise a productive, happy, healthy child into adulthood.
We urge lawmakers and organizations to:
- Provide protected time for parental leave for all parents during childbearing years
- Support additional protections for clinicians who are breastfeeding or pumping
- Establish oversight and enforcement processes that ensure the burden of compliance does not fall on those who rely on them
8. Reforming Tort Laws
We urge lawmakers to reform tort laws to protect patients from negligent care and clinicians from frivolous lawsuits.
9. Providing Student Loan Relief
Clinicians go through years of intensive training, incur extreme amounts of debt from their medical education and give up time spent with their families to provide lifesaving care to their community members. We urge lawmakers to provide student loan debt relief and repayment options for medical students and clinicians.
To learn more about what we’re doing to establish the best place to practice for our clinicians, or to view our full list of recommendations, visit our website.
Emily Olsen 
Susanna Vogel