Patient safety efforts offer lessons for tackling clinician burnout

In a recent commentary, Victor Dzau, MD, president of the National Academy of Medicine (NAM), and Albert Wu, MD, MPH, Johns Hopkins Center for Health Services and Outcomes Research, discuss how lessons learned from the patient safety movement can be used to help address clinician burnout, a NAM priority. Those lessons include focusing on systems-level factors, cultivating institutional and leadership commitment to change, using measurement to promote accountability, and fostering directed leadership to implement successful change. “Failure of ‘the system’ rather than individual providers is now widely understood to be the cause of hazards and harm to patients,” the authors write. “In formulating solutions, determining which factors are most influential, which might be the most feasible to reverse, and where to anticipate resistance is important. This principle also applies to burnout.” (Annals of Internal Medicine article, 12/17/19)