A new study done by Stanford Medicine claims that physician burnout might be as much responsible- if not more- for medical errors as unsafe medical workplace conditions are.
Tait Shanafelt, director of the Stanford WellMD Center and associate dean of the School of Medicine said, “If we are trying to maximize the safety and quality of medical care, we must address the factors in the work environment that lead to burnout among our health care providers. Many system-level changes have been implemented to improve safety for patients in our medical workplaces. What we find in this study is that physician burnout levels appear to be equally, if not more, important than the work unit safety score to the risk of medical errors occurring.”
The study is going to be published today online in the journal Mayo Clinic Proceedings. Shanafelt, also the professor of hematology and the Jeanie and Stew Ritchie Professor is the senior author of the paper and Daniel Tawfik, MD, and also an instructor in pediatric critical medicine at Stanford is the lead author of the paper.
Medical errors are quite common in US, with some of the previous studies reporting the errors to be responsible for about 100,000 to 200,000 deaths every year, but hardly any researches have focused on how physician burnouts could be contributing to these errors. For the study, scientists worked with physicians from several states and asked them to fill out surveys. 55 percent reported “symptoms-syn” of physician burnout, 10 percent admitted to having made at least one major error during the prior three months- a finding that supported the previous research.
“We found that physicians with burnout had more than twice the odds of self-reported medical error, after adjusting for specialty, work hours, fatigue and work unit safety rating,” explained Tawfik. “We also found that low safety grades in work units were associated with three to four times the odds of medical error.”
Shanafelt added, “This indicates both the burnout level as well as work unit safety characteristics are independently related to the risk of errors.”
Physician burnout is a national epidemic in the US right now- with many doctors reported to have experienced symptoms of exhaustion, cynicism, and reduced effectiveness. This new study by Stanford reports that physician burnout also affects the overall quality of medical care, turnover rates and patient satisfaction.
Shanafelt stressed that not many organisations focus on the system-level factors that drives doctors and nurses to burnout. He feels that we should be taking a more holistic and system-based approach to tackle the problem of physician burnout.
“Up until just recently, the prevailing thought was that if medical errors are occurring, you need to fix the workplace safety with things like checklists and better teamwork,” Tawfik concluded. “This study shows that that is probably insufficient. We need a two-pronged approach to reduce medical errors that also addresses physician burnout.”