The 4 key steps to preventing healthcare administrator burnout

• Burnout is a critical issue across the healthcare sector
• Automation can help in multiple ways
• Workflow automation in healthcare is changing the lives of patients, and healthcare providers

Burnout has long been endemic within the healthcare sector, but the pressures of the pandemic amplified the scale of burnout to crisis levels. Today, healthcare staff are 3.3x more likely than workers in other sectors to report symptoms of burnout, which include anxiety, exhaustion, forgetfulness, and depression.¹ When it comes to plans for preventing burnout in healthcare, it’s typically doctor and nurse burnout that receives the most attention owing to their public-facing roles. However, the experiences of administrative and HR teams within healthcare organizations deserve airtime too.

System pressure affects all staff, and burnout-fuelled high exit and sickness rates are having serious consequences on operations and patient care. To ensure the efficient and effective running of healthcare services, it’s essential that healthcare leaders explore new and proven strategies for eliminating and preventing burnout in their administrative teams. Based on my experience working with hundreds of healthcare organizations, these are the most impactful strategies that managers can deploy in pursuit of the reduction and prevention of burnout amongst healthcare administrators.

Looking below the surface is important in establishing the real causes of burnout, and in planning how burnout can be prevented. Leaders in healthcare organizations often think that they have a good grasp of the reasons for escalating reports of burnout in their workforce, but they rarely have a complete or fully accurate picture. This can lead to wasted time and wasted efforts, as burnout ‘prevention’ measures either fail to make an impact or even make the problem worse.

Before changes or improvements are piloted, it’s important to do research with a cross-section of administrative staff to establish which tasks and issues are causing stress and generating a high volume of work. Asking staff to record which tasks they spend their time on every day for a week or more can be a good way of highlighting where their time and energy is being drained, and can help to identify priority areas for improvement. Face-to-face conversations in an informal setting can also be valuable in helping staff to open up about the real sources of pressure and canvas their suggestions for preventing burnout.

It’s time to replace manual, paper-based processes with automation and secure digital technologies. It never fails to surprise me that in 2023, there are still admin teams in healthcare organizations that are relying on manual, paper-based processes for their everyday operations. Digital transformation has moved at a sluggish pace in the health and social care sector, owing to a combination of data security hurdles, funding obstacles, and a dearth of incentives to drive progress. However, organizations that are lagging behind with the automation of their operations are going to inevitably see much higher rates of burnout, human error, and inefficiency within their administrative departments.

Leaders who are serious about reducing workload and giving staff time back to prevent burnout in healthcare must not delay in exploring opportunities to automate the most time-consuming and onerous tasks. Often NHS providers can access funding to support digital transformation, and teams will welcome the chance to leave behind a lot of the headache of HR and compliance paperwork once and for all.

We should also be seeking to remove unnecessary workload from the staff recruitment and onboarding process. The automation of laborious admin processes is one way to increase capacity within an organization and to relieve the burden on staff. A second option is to increase the size of the workforce via recruitment and hiring. However, with staff shortages and poor retention rates plaguing the healthcare sector, this is often easier said than done. On account of the large number of checks and verification processes that HR teams and new candidates must complete before employment officially begins, it can take up to 60 days for hires to start working. Not only does this process pile a huge volume of work on the plate of administrative staff (from manually updating qualification databases to chasing up references), it also can result in candidates dropping out of the process in frustration, opting to work for competitor organizations instead.

To address this, hiring and onboarding processes should be audited from start to finish. Look at data and talk to HR managers to find out the reasons why candidates drop out of the process, identify the steps that most often cause delay, and pinpoint the human error danger points that could trip up the organization during an inspection. If a process can be automated or streamlined, get the ball rolling on selecting the right software to do this. If there are examples of good practices, think about how they can be replicated and scaled across the organization.

Burnout in healthcare is most often caused by a combination of pressures that can be both internal and external to the workplace. Although it’s within the control of leadership to tackle issues within their organizations, it’s much more difficult to resolve pressures and stresses in the out-of-work lives of staff. However, by offering flexible working opportunities personalized to the unique and changing needs of each staff member, leaders can make a real difference to the well-being of staff. For example, if a mother needs to be able to drop her children off at school because of childcare issues, simply reflecting these needs in her rota is likely to have a huge impact on her quality of life and reduce her risk of burnout. Flexible working is no longer a ‘nice-to-have’ in healthcare careers –  it’s a powerful tool that will improve staff retention, well-being, and performance.

There are no shortcuts to tackling and preventing burnout in healthcare administrative teams. However, as explored above, there are a number of effective actions that will make a significant difference to the workload and well-being of the workforce. If these actions are pursued, capacity will be increased, staff retention will improve, time and money will be saved, and ultimately, patients will benefit from safer, better-quality treatment.