Challenges in Region X: A Common Theme of Workforce Burnout

8/28/2024

By Anthony Harvey, Data and Information Specialist, NWRPCA

NWRPCA’s training needs assessment is conducted on an annual basis and is used throughout the following year to help determine what kinds of trainings and sessions we as a PCA should work towards offering to health center employees and affiliates throughout our region. Our most recently facilitated assessment (conducted 09/2023-10/2023) garnered over 300 participants from health centers across WA, OR, ID, & AK.

One of our core questions has participants rank their organization’s top five anticipated non-clinical challenges for the upcoming year (2024 in this case). One clear commonality shared across all four states in region X was the identification of “workforce burnout/fatigue” as the number one anticipated challenge. This result was consistent across our unweighted and weighted measures, suggesting workforce burnout to be a challenge that is both widespread and highly impactful. Our “unweighted” measure ranks challenges by number of times identified (regardless of rank). Our “weighted” measure ranks challenges by weighted score, where a ranking of 1 is worth more than a ranking of 2 and so on.

The challenge of workforce burnout identified by our participants in region X is consistent with the broader national conversation, with the CDC reporting that 46% of health workers reported often feeling burned out in 2022 (up from 32% in 2018)[1]. While the COVID-19 pandemic undoubtedly exacerbated issues leading to burnout, the magnitude of a 43.75% increase in reports of frequent burnout compared to 4 years prior may suggest there is even more going on. Adding to that NWRPCA’s more recently collected data suggesting it to be the number one anticipated non-clinical challenge for health center employees going into 2024, it is clear this challenge is lasting in our post-pandemic world.

Accompanying workforce burnout in consistently placing among the top ranked anticipated non-clinical challenges were “retention” & “recruitment”. This makes some intuitive sense in that significant interplay is possible between these challenges, where the extremity of one challenge can exacerbate the others. If employees are burned out, they may be more likely to leave their position (i.e. retention becomes a challenge), which in turn could highlight the effectiveness of existing recruitment strategies. On the flip side, it is interesting to consider how improving any one of these issues may help alleviate the others. For example, if an organization is effective at recruiting in response to retention issues, any increased workload for the remaining staff during periods of turnover can be kept to a minimum, lessening the likelihood of burnout and, by proxy, any additional retention issues that may have resulted from said burnout. This highlights the importance of addressing these challenges and the potential for a compounding positive impact across interdependent issues.

On the topic of interplay between such challenges as workforce burnout and retention, we can look at NWRPCA’s salary and benefits survey report to gauge turnover rates among region X health centers as well as the reason for this turnover. Our most recent survey conducted in 2022 showed that the average turnover rate across all staff types was 26.7% for region X health centers in 2021 (up from 23.5% in 2019). When participating organizations were asked about the reason for turnover over the past 12 months, “Burnout” was the reason in 7.9% of cases. This helps us to gauge the degree of interplay between workforce burnout and retention. While burnout was the cited reason for turnover a significant amount of the time, it was far overshadowed by reasons such as “Compensation/Benefits” which accounted for 34.2% of the cited reasons. *However, it is worth noting that the reason for turnover of “COVID/Pandemic” was cited in 31.6% of cases, which may be a proxy for burnout to some degree (i.e. pandemic related burnout). Hence, workforce burnout may be contributing more to retention issues than the 7.9% figure would initially suggest.

Where possible, NWRPCA has accounted for region X’s anticipated challenge of burnout when determining session and training offerings. Notably, out of 34 total sessions that were held at NWRPCA’s 2024 Spring Summit, the only session to receive a perfect satisfaction score in its attendee evaluation was “Resilience, Burnout, & Vicarious Trauma: A Participatory Workshop on Workplace Well-Being”. In addition, NWRPCA hosted another burnout-focused session “Caring for the Caregivers: Addressing Burnout and Compassion Fatigue in Healthcare”[2] during our Partners in Care virtual conference series, which ended up being the most attended session in the series by a large margin (51.6% higher attendance than the 2nd most attended session). Such outcomes demonstrate the value of NWRPCA’s annual Training Needs Assessment in that we can offer sessions and trainings consistent with what health center employees throughout region X need/want the most.

Following our last annual Training Needs Assessment, NWRPCA held a total of 114 sessions during our last Fall, Western Forum and Spring Conferences, as well as 25 webinars offered between 10/2023 – 07/2024. Over the next 6 months, we have plans for 61 sessions across our in-person conferences & 11 webinars to be held virtually (click here for our upcoming events).

For a full look at the non-clinical challenges anticipated for 2024 throughout region X and by state, please refer to the below visuals. When interpreting the below visuals, the charts “Ranked by Weighted Score” can be thought of as challenges impacting people the most. Whereas the charts “Ranked by Times Identified” can be thought of as being more in the direction of impacting the most people (provided the challenge met the minimum threshold of placing somewhere in the participants’ top 5).

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/vitalsigns/health-worker-mental-health/

[2] Both “Resilience, Burnout, & Vicarious Trauma: A Participatory Workshop on Workplace Well-Being” & “Caring for the Caregivers: Addressing Burnout and Compassion Fatigue in Healthcare” were hosted by speaker Ann Marie Roepke, Ph.D.

Non-Clinical Challenges Anticipated for 2024 (Region X):