According to a recent report by the Atlanta-based Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), health care workers continue to face significant challenges within the workspace. On Tuesday, the CDC’s “Vital Signs” report revealed that more than double the number of health care workers reported harassment at work last year compared to 2018. From threats to bullying to verbal abuse, the rise in harassment has only exacerbated other issues health care heroes are facing in the field.
“We depend on our nation’s health workers and they must be supported,” CDC chief medical officer Debra Houry, M.D., M.P.H., said in the report. “Employers can act now by modifying working conditions associated with burnout and poor mental health outcomes in health settings. And, CDC’s National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) will be launching a national campaign—the Impact Wellbeing campaign—to provide health employers with resources to improve worker mental health.”
Before the pandemic began, health care workers were already facing “crisis levels” of burnout. The arrival of COVID-19, and its crippling of health care systems around the globe, only introduced new challenges to those working within the industry.
“This report is the first to describe and compare self-reported well-being and working conditions for health workers, other essential workers, and all other workers before the pandemic (2018) and after the start of the pandemic (2022),” the CDC reported. “It shows that health workers have continued to face a mental health crisis. From 2018 to 2022, U.S. health workers experienced greater declines on a range of mental health outcomes than other workers.”
As part of the report, the CDC has issued a call to action — including that health care workers should be allowed to participate in decision-making, building trust in management, providing supervisor assistance and enough time to complete work, and preventing and paying attention to harassment reports.
“CDC’s efforts to address health worker mental health come at the right time, as we see how health workers have self-reported a unique increase in poor mental health, especially after a global pandemic,” L. Casey Chosewood, M.D., M.P.H., director of the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health’s Office for Total Worker Health, said in the report. “In this study, we saw that when working conditions are positive, and where health workers are supported and have the potential to thrive, poor mental health outcomes were less likely. Employers can make a critical difference here by taking preventive actions and improving difficult working conditions that are linked with anxiety, depression, and burnout.”
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