Want to Improve the Well-Being of Health Workers? The System Itself Must Change

  The pandemic has brought attention to the safety, health, and well-being of workers in healthcare. Recent efforts to address these issues include, the Office of the Surgeon General’s Addressing Health Worker Burnout,(1) an “Advisory on Building a Thriving Health Workforce,” from the National Academy of Medicine’s National Plan for Healthcare Workforce Wellbeing (2) and the  NIOSH Health Worker Mental Health Initiative (3). For today’s health workers, feeling chronically overwhelmed is commonplace. Increasing evidence of unremitting levels of high work-related stress, often beyond the control of the clinicians, can lead to severe physical and emotional harm. Such stress threatens the