Healthcare Staff Wellbeing, Burnout, and Patient Safety: A Systematic Review
By Louise H Hall, Judith Johnson, Ian Watt, A. Tsipa, Daryl B. O’Connor. PLoS ONE, 2016
1,347 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Objective To determine whether there is an association between healthcare professionals’ wellbeing and burnout, with patient safety. Design Systematic research review. Data Sources PsychInfo (1806 to July 2015), Medline (1946 to July 2015), Embase (1947 to July 2015) and Scopus (1823 to July 2015) were searched, along with reference lists of eligible articles. Eligibility Criteria for Selecting Studies Quantitative, empirical studies that included i) either a measure of wellbeing or burnout, and ii) patient safety, in healthcare staff populations. Results Forty-six studies were identified. Sixteen out of the 27 studies that measured wellbeing found a significant correlation between poor wellbeing and worse patient safety, with six additional studies finding an association with some but not all scales used, and one study finding a significant association but in the opposite direction to the majority of studies. Twenty-one out of the 30 studies that measured burnout found a significant association between burnout and patient safety, whilst a further four studies found an association between one or more (but not all) subscales of the burnout measures employed, and patient safety. Conclusions Poor wellbeing and moderate to high levels of burnout are associated, in the majority of studies reviewed, with poor patient safety outcomes such as medical errors, however the lack of prospective studies reduces the ability to determine causality. Further prospective studies, research in primary care, conducted within the UK, and a clearer definition of healthcare staff wellbeing are needed. Implications This review illustrates the need for healthcare organisations to consider improving employees’ mental health as well as creating safer work environments when planning interventions to improve patient safety. Systematic Review Registration PROSPERO registration number: CRD42015023340.
Subfields: General Health Professions, Sociology and Political Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e5ee14afbc1a7e96b51195ab8df3beea72909868
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Citations in the corpus
- A Survey of Robots in Healthcare (2021, background): “The physical and mental well-being of healthcare personnel is connected to safe and high-quality healthcare [4].”
- Intelligent Clinical Documentation: Harnessing Generative AI for Patient-Centric Clinical Note Generation (2024, background): “However, the time-consuming nature of documentation has become a significant burden for healthcare professionals, leading to burnout, medical errors, and compromised patient safety [1,2,3].”
- Association Between Physician Burnout and Patient Safety, Professionalism, and Patient Satisfaction: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis (2018, neutral): “Moreover, 2 recent systematic reviews have associated high burnout in health care professionals with the receipt of less-safe patient care.(11,12)However, these reviewshave significant limitations.”
- Physician Burnout, Well-being, and Work Unit Safety Grades in Relationship to Reported Medical Errors (2018, neutral): “Distress in health care professionals has been associated with patient safety events, including medical errors.(12) Most studies evaluating health care professional burnout and quality of care have found an inverse relationship,(13-19) although this finding has not been universal.”