A Focus on Wellness; Keynote Speaker Tait Shananfelt, MD, Shared Causes of Occupational Burnout & Pearls to Prevent It

Another contributing factor to burnout is the double-edged sword of common physician traits. Example: Most physicians are thorough, committed to their patients and recognize the responsibility that comes with patient trust. These are important qualities that make us good physicians, he said, but they also often make it hard to set boundaries or take time off. This makes it harder for us to relax and  allocate time for family.

Some signs of burnout include losing the sense that you’re making a difference at work, seeing your patients or co-workers in a less-than-human way (also called depersonalization) and emotional exhaustion.

Although it’s common for everyone to experience those feelings, when they occur too frequently and to too severe a degree they indicate burnout, which can undermine professional efficacy. Occupational burnout is common among physicians and other healthcare workers and is also frequently experienced by those whose work involves intense contact with people, such as teachers, social workers and police officers, he said.

Facing professional burnout can become a big issue because of how it affects a person’s life professionally and personally, Dr. Shanafelt said. It can strain relationships and increase the risk for alcohol use and depression. Professionally, it can raise the risk of turnover, sub-optimal patient experience and medical errors.

Pearls to Address Burnout

Dr. Tait Shanafelt at ACR Convergence 2025

While some have suggested that physicians and other clinicians need to be tougher or more resilient, that’s the wrong answer. Physicians are already incredibly resilient, Dr. Shanafelt explained.

“The current healthcare delivery system is burning out [some of] the most resilient human beings on planet Earth. We won’t resilience our way out of this,” he said.

Dr. Shanafelt spent the majority of this time focused on what healthcare organizations need to do to address this issue. Steps included:

1. Start at the top. Dr. Shanafelt indicated that leader behavior is a key driver of the professional fulfillment of the physicians they lead. Effective leaders create a shared sense of purpose within for team members, engage team members to identify and prioritize opportunities for improvement, and empower them to put those that are possible into practive.
2. At the organizational level, find changes to make daily work less burdensome. He gave a surgical example. “If your ORs are taking too long to turn around, and the anesthesiologist, surgeon and nursing OR team are all going home late and missing dinner, the solution is not to teach the surgeon to meditate between cases. It’s to get the operating room turned around more efficiently,” he said. If many initiatives are needed to make workflow more efficient, start with one actionable step and then build out from there.
3. Consider using ambient AI note taking. Given the evidence that EHR documentation burden is one major contributor to burnout, it is important organizations address this issue. Ambient AI note taking during an appointment may not address all of this burden, but eight studies published in the past 12 months suggest it can make a major impact.  Although EHR timestamps suggest the time savings is modest (20 minutes per four hours of seeing patients) the reductions in cognitive load and burnout are large.²

“In my own practice when I use this, I find I’m able to pay attention to the patient. I don’t worry about tracking every detail of what they’re telling me,” he explained.