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ASHP Leading the Way on Well-Being & Resilience

Paul W. Abramowitz, Pharm.D., Sc.D. (Hon.), FASHP

THE FOCUS ON CLINICIAN BURNOUT as a growing public health problem is gaining significant momentum. ASHP is an original sponsor of the National Academy of Medicine (NAM) Action Collaborative on Clinician Well-Being and Resilience and is honored to lead the pharmacy profession on this issue. We recognize that a healthy and thriving clinician workforce is essential to ensuring optimal patient health outcomes and safety. Therefore, ASHP is committed to fostering and sustaining the well-being, resilience, and professional engagement of pharmacists, pharmacy residents, student pharmacists, and pharmacy technicians. In his inaugural address, ASHP President Paul Bush called for a three-pronged approach to supporting the pharmacy workforce: building staff resilience, providing technician training and support, and encouraging clinicians to be leaders. ASHP’s commitment to improving pharmacy workforce well-being and resilience can be read here and is embedded within our recently revised Strategic Plan (Goal 4, Our Patients and Their Care).

Burnout is associated with a loss of productivity in the healthcare workforce. If you extrapolate this loss to a national level, it is equivalent to the elimination of seven graduating classes of medical schools. And healthcare worker burnout is not the only concern; a bidirectional relationship exists between burnout and medical error. For example, one study found that nursing burnout resulted in increased healthcare-associated infections. At the individual clinician level, burnout presents as emotional exhaustion (i.e., compassion fatigue), depersonalization and cynicism, and a low sense of accomplishment. At the healthcare-system or institution level, it is associated with medical errors, loss of productivity, added malpractice claims, and increased risk of patient harm. Currently, we don’t have a deep research portfolio specific to the pharmacy workforce, but we hear from you that it is an issue that needs to be addressed, and ASHP stands ready to help.

The Action Collaborative formally kicked off in January 2017 and has three goals related to increasing understanding of and identifying evidence-based solutions for clinician well-being and resilience. ASHP is actively contributing to discussions on individual and external factors that impact well-being and resilience as part of the conceptual model working group. Since the risk of clinician burnout spans all ages, stages, and career paths, this working group is tasked with identifying a model that captures the complexity of clinician well-being and resilience without oversimplifying the contributing factors. A new conceptual model was recently created to illustrate the interrelated and interlocking factors affecting clinician well-being and burnout while simultaneously conveying a vision and solutions. ASHP is a contributing author to the discussion paper that details the journey in constructing this new model.

In addition to our collaboration with NAM and contributions through the working group, ASHP is engaging our members on pharmacy well-being and resilience by:

• Holding a Joint Meeting on Clinician Well-Being and Resilience of all ASHP Councils and Commissions during Policy Week 2017.
• Launching a Clinician Well-Being and Resilience Connect Community to facilitate discussion and information-sharing related to well-being and resilience.
• Supporting research on risk factors for burnout as well as strategies to support resilience and well-being.
• Publishing content in AJHP including “Burnout syndrome among healthcare professionals” and “Adverse impact of pharmacy resident stress during training.”.
• Educating residents and preceptors through presentations at the 2018 regional resident conferences and the ASHP Summer and Midyear Clinical Meetings.
• Educating ASHP state affiliate members through presentations.

If your organization has been working on resilience efforts to support wellness of its employees, we would love to hear from you. We encourage you to share your stories through our community on ASHP Connect. Or, maybe you know of an individual or an organization that is demonstrating positive progress to start the conversation on resilience and supporting a healthy and engaged workforce. If so, we encourage you to send us these ideas, and we can take these concepts back to the national conversation on this topic.

Thanks so much for being an ASHP member and for everything you do for your patients and pharmacy teams.

Sincerely,

Paul