Dr Dominic Pimenta, Jasmine Balloch, and Dr Ellie Asgari from TORTUS explore the impact of clinical workload on NHS clinicians and how approaches to EHR systems could be improved
Burnout in the NHS workforce has reached fever-pitch: nearly two-thirds of junior doctors ‘are at high to moderate risk of burnout’ – a figure that grows even higher in fields such as primary care. (1)
Healthcare professionals experiencing burnout cite workforce shortages, high workloads and time pressures, as well as poor organisational support as the primary drivers of their symptoms; each has also been cited as influencing clinicians’ intention to leave the NHS. (2)
In April, working alongside clinical experts from within the NHS, colleagues at TORTUS published a narrative review paper in the JMIR Medical Informatics titled ‘Impact of Electronic Health Record Use on Cognitive Loads and Burnout Among Clinicians’. The paper identified multiple studies that show how clinicians’ interactions with electronic health record (EHR) systems are a contributor to so-called ‘cognitive overload’. This overload impacts performance and, over a sustained duration, can lead to burnout.
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