Occupational Stress and Burnout in Healthcare Workers

Dear Colleagues,

Burnout manifests as emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and a diminished sense of professional accomplishment, resulting from chronic exposure to workplace stress. Clinician burnout has reached epidemic levels, with prevalence rates of 48% among physicians (AMA, 2024) and 62% among nurses (ANA, 2020). Physician and nurse burnout are detrimental to healthcare workers’ health and well-being, being associated with anxiety, depressive symptoms, sleep disturbances, problematic alcohol use, traffic accidents, and suicidal ideation. Burnout also negatively impacts healthcare workers’ careers, contributing to lost productivity and increased turnover. For healthcare organizations and payers, clinician burnout incurs significant economic costs. For patients, it is associated with reduced patient safety, satisfaction, and quality of care.

We are pleased to invite you to contribute your research on occupational stress and burnout among healthcare workers for consideration for this Special Issue, which will explore the conceptualization, measurement, epidemiology, causes, and consequences of healthcare worker burnout, as well as possible interventions.

For this Special Issue, original research articles and reviews are welcome. Research areas may include (but are not limited to) the following:

• Definitions, symptoms, and the nomological network of burnout, especially its relationship with moral distress or moral injury, compassion fatigue, and secondary traumatic stress or vicarious trauma;
• The measurement and surveillance of burnout, including survey validation in specific languages or populations, and novel measures such as biomarkers and digital footprints;
• Prevalence rates of burnout across specific healthcare professions (e.g., pharmacists, physical therapists, clinical social workers), regions (e.g., low- and middle-income countries, rural and remote areas), and settings (e.g., primary care, nursing homes, veterans’ care), with a focus on understudied populations;
• Causes and risk factors for healthcare worker burnout, including genetic and personality traits, team-level and relational dynamics, and organizational and institutional influences;
• Consequences of healthcare worker burnout in relation to clinicians’ health and well-being, organizational behavior, healthcare organizations, health systems, health policy, and patient outcomes;
• Interventions to address healthcare worker burnout, including individual-level strategies, organization-level strategies, systems-level strategies, and multi-level approaches;
• Healthcare worker burnout in the era of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI), including how AI may both exacerbate technostress and help prevent or mitigate burnout.

I look forward to receiving your contributions.

Dr. Lambert Zixin Li
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Healthcare is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2700 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• clinician burnout
• healthcare worker burnout
• physician burnout
• nurse burnout
• healthcare professional burnout