News: Emotional exhaustion increased from 31.8% of healthcare workers in 2019 to 40.4% in second year of pandemic

Emotional exhaustion among healthcare workers has increased significantly during the COVID-19 pandemic, according to new research published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) Network Open. The characteristics of emotional exhaustion include feeling drained, overwhelmed, and unable to meet demands, HealthLeaders reported.

The research is based on survey data collected in September 2019, September 2020, and September 2021 through January 2022. The survey respondents were clinical and nonclinical healthcare workers at two large healthcare systems, including 76 community hospitals. Data was collected from more than 100,000 surveys.

The new research highlights four key data points:

• From September 2019 to January 2022, overall emotional exhaustion among the healthcare workers increased from 31.8% to 40.4%.
• Emotional exhaustion among physicians decreased from 31.8% in 2019 to 28.3% in 2020, then increased to 37.8% in the second year of the pandemic.
• Emotional exhaustion among nurses increased from 40.6% in 2019 to 46.5% in 2020 and 49.2% in the second year of the pandemic.
• For all other healthcare workers, emotional exhaustion increased from 31.2% in 2019 to 40.5% in the second year of the pandemic.

The study “offers substantial evidence that emotional exhaustion trajectories varied by role but have increased overall and among most [healthcare workers’] roles since the onset of the pandemic. These results suggest that current [healthcare workers’] well-being resources and programs may be inadequate and even more difficult to use owing to lower workforce capacity and motivation to initiate and complete well-being interventions," the study's co-authors wrote.

The decrease in emotional exhaustion among physicians in 2020 may be related to healthcare practice changes (specifically increased telehealth and decreased patient volumes) in the early phase of the pandemic, the study's co-authors wrote.

Addressing healthcare workers’ well-being is made more difficult when emotional exhaustion levels increase, the study's co-authors wrote, because "taking time to do something about well-being then becomes one more thing on an overwhelmed to-do list."

Efforts to address healthcare workers’ well-being are falling short of the challenge, the study's co-authors wrote. "Existing programs and resources to facilitate [healthcare workers’] well-being were inadequate before the pandemic and now appear to be woefully inadequate."

Editor’s note: This article originally appeared in HealthLeaders. To read the full study from JAMA Open Network, click here. To read more about burnout in healthcare, click here.