As imaging practices look to help radiologists recover from pandemic-related burnout and stress, leaders must augment and transform their previous anti-burnout strategies, experts advised Wednesday.
Numerous studies have documented COVID-19’s impact on the specialty, including one estimate that 50% of radiologists are suffering emotional stress. But to begin addressing this issue, organizations and leaders will need to embrace “broader concepts of wellness,” two radiologists argued in JACR.
Successful burnout-mitigation efforts during and after the COVID crisis will require fostering interconnectedness and building high-performing teams. Leaders must also complement these changes with advanced technology, and improvements to their practice’s environment and culture.
Fostering “post-traumatic growth” as practices and their employees emerge from the pandemic is crucial, argued Jonathan Kruskal MB, ChB, PhD, and Tait Shanafelt, MD.
“As radiology practices begin to reimagine their future structures and function, careful attention will need to focus on supporting the post-pandemic workforce, recognizing that employee well-being is a key factor in determining an organization’s long-term effectiveness,” the authors, with Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Stanford University, respectively, wrote April 13.
To foster such growth, Kruskal and Shanafelt recommend several interventions. Those include education (understanding one’s trauma), emotional regulation (managing these feelings), disclosure (of burnout’s effects) narrative development (of the trauma and a better future) and finding meaning through service.
“As we manage [post-traumatic growth], leaders will need to actively engage in and lead and monitor the impact of wellness efforts, while implementing processes to engage and sustain remote and often distributed teams,” the authors advised. “It is possible that leaders will need to engage in new style of leadership; meta-leadership, for example, developed by observing leader in high-stress situations, catalyzes collaborative activities to solve complex problems and focuses on improving performance by expanding thinking beyond formal bounds of authority,” they added.
Read more of their advice in the Journal of the American College of Radiology here.
Marty Stempniak has covered healthcare since 2012, with his byline appearing in the American Hospital Association's member magazine, Modern Healthcare and McKnight's. Prior to that, he wrote about village government and local business for his hometown newspaper in Oak Park, Illinois. He won a Peter Lisagor and Gold EXCEL awards in 2017 for his coverage of the opioid epidemic.