Addressing Burnout: Understanding the Root Causes in the Workplace

November 17, 2023
Helen Sairany, PharmD, MBA, BCACP

In this multi-part series on burnout and the problems currently facing pharmacy, trauma-informed pharmacist Helen Sairany, PharmD, MBA, discusses why burnout is skyrocketing.

The United States health care system is facing a moment of reckoning. Every year, the United States loses over 250,000 lives due to preventable death. These causes are not necessarily due to the provider’s negligence, but often have more to do with the compassion fatigue experienced by many health care providers after the COVID-19 pandemic.

Health care providers are finally voicing their concerns about the impacts of their workplace demands and the negative impact it is having on patient safety.

As a global pharmacist who has traveled all over the world and practiced on the front lines overseas, I find some of the statistics about preventable health care errors hard to fathom considering the United States has some of the most competent health care professionals in the world. Not only that, but we also have the most advanced systems and technologies for these providers to do their jobs at their maximum potential. Which makes me wonder about the real challenges in the health care system.

The problem is that health care institutions in the United States are run like businesses. Roughly 5% of health care consists of providers who go into the profession to provide the optimal care to the most vulnerable populations. The remaining 95% of the health care system is about number crunching. And the problem is not in us, because we are trained and know what we are supposed to do. We enter this profession to help, but don't know how to care for ourselves. We are also not cared for by the system we serve in. Our talent, our passion, and our credibility are limited to a metric. The residual impact of this system is that we are caught up in details and not what matters: the well-being of the provider who cares for the sick. The more we are caught in the details, the more we feel unfulfilled with what we have signed up for. The more we feel unfulfilled, the more we retract not only from each other but from the core of the health care system: the sick. The more we have retracted from each other, the lonelier and sicker we have become.

It is apparent that employees, especially front-line health care workers, are not simply tired. For so many, the rigorous training they signed up for has slowly but surely become an all-consuming inevitability, necessary to live but taking up most of life. Burnout is not just physical fatigue; it is a kind of disillusionment. It is a natural response to an awareness that an endless cycle of living to work is emotionally, physically, and mentally depleting.

The COVID-19 pandemic has amplified work-life challenges for many employees, as boundaries between work and home life become blurred. In these difficult times, the reality is that we need to make a living, but we also need to make sure that we are still “living” to avoid becoming burned out.

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