Hospital understaffing and poor work conditions associated with physician and nurse burnout and intent to leave

A unique collaborative study on hospital clinician well-being by teams at 60 of the nation’s best hospitals, defined by Magnet Hospital Recognition, was published today in JAMA Health Forum. The study found that physicians and nurses, even at hospitals known to be good places to work, experienced adverse outcomes during the pandemic and want hospital management to make significant improvements in their work environments and in patient safety. The solutions to high hospital clinician burnout and turnover, they say, are not resilience training for clinicians to better cope with adverse working conditions, but organizational improvements that provide safe workloads and better work-life balance.