Tips for Reducing Stress and Burnout for Your Practitioners

You likely have numerous activities and habits in your practice that are wasting time, increasing workloads, and contributing to stress and burnout. While you can’t eliminate all these, look for ways to stop the following:

• Directly responding to patient questions coming through the patient portal. Protocols that allow team members to triage and address messages can help. Having some basic information, resources, and sample Q&As also can be useful.
• Making phone calls or sending patient portal messages to review lab results. Have pre-visit lab protocols and review results with patients during their appointments.
• Getting caught up or bogged down by patients’ or families’ unexpected questions and issues. Use pre-appointment questionnaires so that you can address issues in advance and make appointments more efficient.
• Refilling long-term medications at each appointment. Providing just enough refills to last until the next appointment adds to the prescriber’s burden. It also increases the chances for non-compliance if patients can’t or won’t go to the pharmacy to get the prescription filled. Allowing long-term medications to be refilled as a 90-day supply with four refills can reduce the prescriber’s burden and increase adherence.
• Accepting burdens because “we’ve always done it that way.” Ask your team what processes, systems, and tasks they think could be eliminated or simplified. Consider how your technology can be used to simplify tasks like documentation, data collection, and information sharing.
• Reinventing the wheel for patient/family information. There are many great resources for patient/family education that are authored/vetted by experienced clinicians. For example, the Caregiver’s Corner column in Caring for the Ages is designed to encourage effective conversations about a wide array of clinical, lifestyle, and quality of life topics.

While it’s impossible to eliminate all sources of stress for your practitioners, you can reduce their workloads, get rid of wasteful paperwork, and give them tools and resources to make their daily tasks easier.