Healthcare Worker Burnout:
Decreasing Clinician Burnout Through Evidence-Based Approaches

Clinician burnout and job dissatisfaction are amongst the greatest challenges facing healthcare today. A recent call-to-action from the Office of the Surgeon General states that more than half of health workers report symptoms of burnout, and many are contending with insomnia, depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder, or other mental health challenges. At Keck Medicine of USC, and hospitals around the country, these factors are contributing to an alarming number of departures from the healthcare workforce. For this reason, Keck Medicine of USC and its Care for the Caregiver program have partnered with USC Dornsife Public Exchange and the Dornsife Center for Economic and Social Research to test a series of interventions that aim to increase wellbeing and address inefficiencies and dissatisfaction in the work environment. Ultimately, the study will inform support systems for caregivers at Keck, with a larger goal of developing a set of evidence-based approaches that can be utilized by hospitals around the country.

The study includes interventions in three key areas: Emotional Wellbeing, Electronic Medical Record (EMR) Skill Training, and Performance Improvement. Each intervention includes six sessions per participant, and will be delivered over a period of 12 weeks. Each participant will be assessed prior to, immediately following, and six months after completing their intervention sessions to determine the extent to which each intervention impacted them.

Emotional Wellbeing

Our wellbeing team at Keck will offer emotional wellbeing intervention sessions to frame and teach emotional health and resilience. Specifically, participants will learn to regulate their emotions using Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and Acceptance Commitment Therapy to reduce anxiety, depression and frustration, while increasing resilience.

Electronic Health Record Skill Training

Members of the informatics team at Keck Medicine will offer EHR skill training intervention sessions focused on how care providers can optimize the EHR system for their practice specialty and setting. The goal of these sessions is for providers to both learn how to better utilize existing features of the EHR system and identify aspects of the system that can be improved to have collateral and sustained benefit for others.

Performance Improvement

The systems re-engineering team at Keck Medicine will provide performance improvement sessions to surface solutions that address the key challenges that care providers face in their daily work. The resulting process improvement recommendations will then be implemented and assessed for their impact on burnout, work satisfaction and retention.

Study Recruitment

This study is a Randomized Controlled Trial in which we will recruit clinicians from across the Keck Medicine of USC environment. The study aims to recruit 400 eligible care providers to participate.

Recruitment for the study is currently open. If you are a Keck care provider interested in participating, please review the qualifying criteria below and click here to complete the screening questionnaire.

Qualifying Criteria

In order to participate in the study, you must:

• Be a Physician, PA, MA, Nurse (NP, RN, LVN), or Licensed Therapist (LCSW, MFT, LPCC, Clinical PhD, PsyD) who spends time working clinically in the Keck Medicine of USC environment
• Be available to attend six intervention sessions (about 30 minutes every two weeks)
• Complete three survey assessments

For more information regarding study recruitment, please email clinicianwellbeingstudy@usc.edu.

Incentives

Participants will be compensated up to $145 and be automatically entered to win a raffle of $1,500 to be used for professional development expenses.