Therapeutic Strategies to Tackle Burnout and Emotional Exhaustion in Frontline Medical Staff: Narrative Review

Abstract

Burnout and emotional exhaustion in frontline healthcare workers and their implications for the health of patients, individual clinicians, and organizations are increasingly described among various healthcare settings. Yet therapeutic strategies to address burnout and other work-related conditions are outpaced by innumerable descriptions of burnout prevalence across healthcare disciplines. This review provides a framework that should be helpful in beginning the process of addressing burnout and its related conditions. It begins with an elucidation of key inter-related concepts of work-related conditions that should be considered in the differential diagnosis along with other mental health conditions that are concomitantly elevated in healthcare clinicians (eg, depression and substance abuse) but require a different approach to treatment. Factors that lead to increased resilience, engagement, and thriving in clinical workplaces are considered. While strategies are dichotomized between organizational level interventions and individual or personal interventions to address burnout, the idea of identifying and addressing root causes of burnout and related conditions is highlighted. The efficacy and feasibility of interventions that incorporate mindfulness-based stress reduction, cognitive behavioral strategies, meaning-centered therapy, and compassion training are highlighted as interventions with proven efficacy and durability that should be considered based on work-related stressors and appeal to clinicians.

The prevalence and risk factors of burnout and its association with mental issues and quality of life among hungarian postal workers: a cross-sectional study

“…This is the first study to our knowledge, which focuses on burnout among postal workers with a complex methodology. Nowadays, burnout is an increasingly widespread phenomenon, predominantly affecting those working in the human services sector, whose daily work requires more empathy and patience [ 28 , 29 ]. Despite its increasing prevalence and its negative impact on health (depression, sleep disturbance, anxiety, etc.…”

Work Ethics and Ethical Attitudes among Healthcare Professionals: The Role of Leadership Skills in Determining Ethics Construct and Professional Behaviors

“…In this study, healthcare providers with high leadership conceptual skills had significantly lower means of intrinsic work motivation. Work exhaustion and burnout, resulting from workload, limited resources and support, and lack of time, could explain this finding [ 36 , 37 ]. However, evidence to support this relationship within the work ethic construct remains insufficient.…”

The Impact of Facades of Conformity on Individual Creativity: The Critical Role of Emotional Exhaustion and Organizational Political Climate

“…If employees have emotional exhaustion for a long time, they may have more negative psychological experiences (Abusamra et al, 2022), such as fatigue and tension (Wright and Cropanzano, 1998;Cropanzano et al, 2003;Halbesleben and Buckley, 2016; Zhou and Chen, 2021), which is harmful to individuals' job performance, causing higher turnover intention (Ángeles López-Cabarcos et al, 2021), and finally results in lower individual creativity. Depending on the conservation of resources theory, negative psychological emotions usually exacerbating the loss of individual resources that make employees burnout (Hobfoll et al, 2018;Wallace and Coughlan, 2022), while this state of affairs cannot be improved, employees will be struggling in both in-role and out-of-role duties (McFarland and Hlubocky, 2021), and finally causing to lower individual creativity. According to the current study, too much pressure at work, low levels of job resources, low levels of job control and so on can bring to emotional exhaustion of employees (Maslach et al, 2001;Wu et al, 2019).…”