Professional coaching effective for managing physician burnout, review finds
Different interventions were effective for different health care professional roles, a review found, with mindfulness-based interventions reducing burnout among nurses and midwives but not physicians.
Mindfulness-based interventions may reduce burnout in a mixture of health care professionals, but professional coaching likely reduces burnout among physicians, especially when sustained for more than four weeks, according to a systematic review and meta-analysis.
Researchers analyzed findings from 93 randomized controlled trials and six cluster randomized controlled trials evaluating interventions to mitigate burnout compared with no active intervention. Included studies included health care professionals directly involved in patient care, evaluated modifiable intervention strategies against no active intervention, and measured a continuous outcome related to burnout with a validated assessment tool. The studied interventions included mindfulness-based interventions, resilience or stress-management training, skills training for specific job functions, group sessions, and professional coaching. The findings were published Nov. 18 in Annals of Internal Medicine.
The review found different interventions were effective for different professional roles. Among physicians, professional coaching was probably effective in reducing some aspects of burnout. Low-certainty evidence showed an effect on emotional exhaustion emotional exhaustion (standardized mean difference [SMD], −0.37;95% CI, −0.62 to −0.13), while moderate-certainty evidence showed an effect on depersonalization (SMD, −0.30; 95% CI, −0.42 to −0.19. However, mindfulness-based interventions may not be effective specifically among physicians, the review found. In contrast, the review found that mindfulness-based interventions may reduce burnout among nurses and midwives and among a mixture of health care professional roles.
The review authors noted that most of the studied interventions lasted at least four weeks and that although the review focused on individual-level interventions, “policymakers must not neglect the organizational-level drivers of burnout.” They said that previous research has also supported the findings that effects of interventions vary by role in health care and that professional coaching provides benefits to physicians.
An accompanying editorial discussed limitations of research in this area, including the need for more multidisciplinary studies of health care teams. “The stresses associated with varied job roles within medicine differ in important ways, and the effects of interventions to promote well-being may also differ across job roles, so role-specific well-being studies are needed,” the editorial said.