In your professional experience, how widespread is burnout among healthcare workers, and what signs make it most evident?
It is difficult to quantify, but the most evident signs are a loss of interest in developing new activities and frequent turnover, with people changing hospitals or healthcare facilities.
In your opinion, what factors contribute most to burnout in the current healthcare context?
The lack of time to dedicate to training and the excessive compression of work schedules.
In the healthcare context, is emotional fatigue discussed enough? Which aspects are most often left unspoken?
I am not sure what exactly we mean by emotional fatigue: it should also include the lack of expression and sharing of the professional’s emotional sphere with colleagues and patients, generating a sort of emotional “autism.”
There is talk of professionals who do not leave the profession, but the organizations. In your opinion, what makes a healthcare worker stay — or what pushes them to leave — today?
Appropriate remuneration could help (especially in the nursing profession), as well as different workloads. On another level, there should be a restoration of social recognition of the role.
When wellbeing initiatives are proposed, the most common response is “I don’t have time.” How do you interpret this lack of time: is it only an organizational issue or also a cultural one?
In my opinion, workplace welfare is more of a cultural issue than an organizational one. People seek wellbeing outside the workplace, which is no longer seen as a place of fulfillment, but merely as a necessity.
How can burnout among healthcare professionals affect the quality of patient care?
It affects both efficiency and effectiveness at various levels. The relationship shifts, more or less imperceptibly, from what is essential to what is minimally standard, eventually becoming insufficient.
What should change, at an organizational or cultural level, to better protect the mental health of healthcare professionals in the coming years?
We need to answer the question of why one chooses to practice a healthcare profession. There must be recognition of skills, of the role, economic recognition, and a normalization of the situation: being constantly in a state of emergency (waiting lists, shifts, relocations, violence) wears anyone down and, above all, does not make the profession attractive