Burnout Among Physicians, Advanced Practice Clinicians and Staff in Smaller Primary Care Practices

Burnout Among Physicians, Advanced Practice Clinicians and Staff in Smaller Primary Care Practices

Caring for the Healers

David Meyers, M.D., AHRQ’s chief medical officer, highlights the Agency’s ongoing efforts to address the challenge of physician burnout. Through the Agency’s EvidenceNOW initiative, AHRQ is using its expertise in practice improvement research to explore how to support primary care practices in building clinician well-being. A new paper in the Journal of General Internal Medicine (JGIM) from EvidenceNOW’s national evaluation team indicated that, in a survey of more than 10,000 primary care team members in over 1,350 primary care practices nationwide, burnout was reported by more than 20 percent of respondents. AHRQ is a member of the National Academy of Medicine’s (NAM) Action Collaborative on Clinician Well-Being and Resilience and recently contributed to a NAM discussion paper on establishing a research agenda on clinician burnout. Dr. Meyers was among the authors of a recent paper that provided practical suggestions for health care systems in choosing appropriate tools for measuring clinician burnout.