Speaker 1: Burnout and moral injury is a huge problem among health professionals, primarily because it's leading to people quitting, and we need those people to serve patients.

Speaker 2: Caring for patients day in and day out can be emotionally draining, especially when you don't feel that you have adequate support.

Speaker 1: There are a lot of good ideas out there, and they are coming from frontline health care workers themselves.

Speaker 2: Health care workers have a lot to say, and a lot of times they are not listened to in terms of the strategies to address burnout and moral injury.

Speaker 1: So burnout has been identified as the product of chronic workplace stress, when the demand for the work and the ability to provide it is mismatched. That is different from moral injury, which is a sensation that you can't provide the care to patients that they need and deserve. It is the problem of witnessing the suffering of your patients, because you're not able to do right by them. Something is obstructing you. Symptoms include health workers quitting, but also health workers getting sick, not being able to sleep, issues of addiction, issues of depression, and even of suicide.

Speaker 3: Before COVID, I think that we were just starting to grapple with these issues, but COVID just exponentially increased the pressure on the workforce. Dr. Lorna Breen was an emergency medicine physician in New York City in March of 2020. She was on the front line of that first wave of COVID. At the end of April 2020, she died by suicide. And at that point, I think the public awareness of this issue of health worker burnout and moral injury just rose. March of 2022, the Dr. Lorna Breen Health Care Provider Protection Act was passed and signed by the president. That resulted in 44 grants to health care organizations to address this issue, as well as the Technical Assistance Center, the Workplace Change Collaborative. The 44 grantees covered areas of making sure that workplaces are safe, making sure that there's enough staffing, making sure that there is fair wages, and also about changing the culture and the structures within organizations to make sure that all of that can happen.

Speaker 4: Health care providers in Puerto Rico often work under challenging conditions. For example, dealing with limited resources, frequent natural disasters, making them particularly vulnerable to burnout. As a result of the HERSA grant, we built a robust program that helped and addressed emotional factors that can potentially affect the way our employees serve in our institutions in Puerto Rico. So collaborating with our community partners, hospitals, nonprofit organizations, AFQACs, we created a model, creating leadership schools, having conversations with our staff, doing rounds in all the departments, having this wellness moment that has been helping us impact more than 5,000 employees, health care workers here in our system and around the island.

Speaker 5: The Mount Sinai Health System is a very large health system. We have seven hospitals across New York City. We know the health care workforce to be a very resilient group from the outset. Really, it's the system within which we work that is driving a lot of these challenges. One of the things that we understand that's critical to the well-being of the workforce is how individuals are led. We've created leadership trainings that we've delivered to hundreds of our leaders already across Mount Sinai, respecting individuals, taking an interest in their careers. When our leaders are demonstrating these skills better, the folks that report to them are experiencing greater measures of well-being.

Speaker 6: The Northeast Oregon Network, otherwise known as NEON, received the HRSA Workforce Resiliency Training Grant in order to focus on the unlicensed health care workforce in Oregon, including their supervisors and the administrators of the organizations that they work in. They work in hospitals, primary care, mental health centers, dental offices, and public health organizations. Folks that are coming into our training have really high levels of secondary traumatic stress and burnout. And what we're seeing four weeks post-training is that those levels are coming down into non-clinical levels of burnout and secondary traumatic stress.

Speaker 3: The Workplace Change Collaborative is funded by the federal government by HRSA to support the 44 grantees that were funded to advance worker and learner well-being in their organization.

Speaker 2: We support the 44 grantees primarily through a learning system, and basically what that is is a collaborative learning community. We bring them together once a month and a couple times a year. Some of them are virtual and some of them are in person to share challenges, to share resources, to share solutions as they're working to address burnout and moral injury at their organizations.

Speaker 6: Being able to meet with the other grantees helps motivation to keep going and knowing that you're not the only one doing this work.

Speaker 4: They provide us access to a network of experts, resources, platforms to share research findings and best practices.

Speaker 3: The Workplace Change Collaborative was also funded to build a national framework for addressing burnout and moral injury. What we've done as the Workplace Change Collaborative is worked with the grantees to learn from them. We've pulled from the literature. We've talked to a lot of experts. We've built an interactive website to help people both frame the challenges, to assess themselves, and then to find the resources to be able to start to make change in their organization.

Speaker 4: The Workplace Change Collaborative has the potential to significantly reduce burnout and moral injury among healthcare workers professionals. This in turn can have a positive ripple effect on patient outcomes and healthcare system as a whole. So basically this will lead us to a more sustainable and resilient healthcare workforce.

Speaker 3: We are going to be looking for opportunities to partner with others to make sure that as people are working on these really important, these really challenging issues, we help other people find the best information. Find us online and reach out to us.