Health Worker Burnout and Moral Injury: Drivers, Effects, and Remedies

The prevalence of burnout among health workers is alarmingly high and worsening. Many factors across the domains of culture of wellness, efficiency of practice and work demands, and personal resilience place workers at risk for burnout. Intervention research has disproportionately studied individually focused interventions to strengthen personal resilience, demonstrating small benefit from such interventions. While coping strategies may have value, we stress the need to focus interventions on mitigating work conditions that breed burnout, such as inadequate levels of staffing, and to rigorously evaluate such interventions. A conceptual framework on burnout must include critical theory interrogating the broader economic, political, and structural forces shaping health care and the relative power of workers. The concept of moral injury may be more apt than burnout for describing the effects on workers’ well-being of accelerating health care consolidation by investor-owned organizations, government austerity policies, and the disempowered position of labor.