COVID-19 Pandemic and Physician Burnout: Ramifications for Healthcare Workforce in the United States

Across the United States, physician burnout is progressively escalating, with accompanying negative sequelae for myriad stakeholders in healthcare, including communities, patients, physicians, and Healthcare Organizations (HCOs) with essential manpower implications. This ubiquitous trend is due to complex and multifactorial elements, including individual physician-related influences, generational perspectives, sociocultural communal effects, HCOs, and more recently the mounting challenges accompanying the COVID-19 pandemic. To achieve the overarching goals of US healthcare provision (ie, safe, effective, patient-centered, timely, efficient, and equitable patient care), proposed solutions should focus on longitudinal actionable data acquisition to meet workforce needs preemptively, resource allocation for wellness programs geared towards enhancing recruitment and retention, and shared responsibility at the level of individual physician and HCO. This descriptive literature-based treatise expounds on the underlying causality for physician burnout, its consequences for the healthcare workforce in the US, and provides individual- and institution-based solutions for its mitigation.