2025 Burnout Trends in Healthcare
Burnout across healthcare continues to rise in 2025—especially among nurses, physicians, and frontline care teams. New research shows that scheduling instability, insufficient recovery, and moral distress remain the primary drivers, but targeted interventions can improve outcomes fast.
“Moral distress is rising in 2025 — but targeted scheduling and support still improve burnout outcomes.”
TL;DR on Burnout in Healthcare Workers
Nurses Reporting Burnout
65%
Primary Care Physicians Reporting Burnout
56.7 %
Frontline Healthcare Workers Reporting Burnout
30-50%
Jennifer and her team review the latest research articles to inform her writing and public speaking. This page communicates a summary of the latest trends, which show that burnout is persistently high across most aspects of the healthcare industry in North America. urnout remains highest among nurses (65%) and primary care physicians (56.7%). Explore our Nursing Burnout Report, Physician Burnout Overview, or dive deeper into the Burnout 101 Framework.
Snapshot on Healthcare
What is unique about Healthcare?
Healthcare burnout behaves differently from burnout in other sectors. The combination of high emotional load, unpredictable scheduling, and safety-critical tasks creates a uniquely volatile environment.. Healthcare teams face unique demand volatility and high-stakes decisions with limited control. Documentation load and patient aggression compound strain. Protective factors—peer cohesion, psychologically safe debriefs, and predictable recovery—separate resilient units from fragile ones.
The Latest Signals:
Scheduling instability and missed breaks predicts 30-day intent to leave.
Violence/abuse incidents tie directly to emotional exhaustion.
Streamlined documentation and team-based tasking free up ~3–5 hrs/week/clinician (insert current stat).
Myth: “Resilience training alone fixes burnout.”
Reality: Workload + control + recovery are the drivers of burnout recovery.
Leadership playbook: Your top three management moves to reduce burnout
Lock in Schedules
Lock in two-week schedule visibility; cap flip-flop shifts—changes to a shift within the 72-hour window cause the most additional complications and stress at work and in workers’ lives outside of work. Add Link.
Debrief Critical Events
Schedules are busy, but this critical timebox following critical events helps to validate feelings and cognitively frame events in a more constructive ways, reducing negative stress.
Add Link
Learn About Jennifer’s Burnout Prevention Workshop
Kinder Care Units
Implement “Return-to-kindness” scripts + escalation for patient aggression and dealing with challenging emotions, family members and caregivers. Prioritizing these cultural norms insulates psychological safety.
Add Link
Metrics that Matter - Stats worth woatching
Number of last-minute schedule changes per week.
Ratio of missed breaks vs breaks taken.
Total # of Incident reports.
Total overtime hours worked by unit or department.
Total annual turnover rates.
Book Jennifer’s Healthcare Burnout Workshop for charge nurses and managers, or Workshop for Healthcare Leaders.
Jennifer offers virtual and in-person keynotes, workshops, seminars, and breakout sessions on workplace well-being, employee mental health, happiness in the workplace, employee burnout, the future of work, and more. From the front line to the C-suite, Jennifer receives rave reviews on her sessions. She is seen here delivering her LinkedIn Learning course titled “Prevent Team Burnout as a Manager.”
-
How to turn our gaze back to the future and decide how we want to be and what we can accomplish when we do. This is one of the secrets of happier employees and happier workplaces.
-
How to think differently about the multigenerational workforces, Equity Deserving populations, and increasing diversity in our workforces. Do the same things create happiness for all populations in the workplace? Not likely. It is important to understand the unique needs and differences and tailor our efforts to increase employee happiness.
-
Understand what flexibility means, why employees care so much about autonomy, and how to use it to create value. Employee happiness relies on feeling confident in our work and feeling like we are trusted and have the confidence of our boss, manager, or supervisor.
-
How and why to invest in belonging, connection, and friendships, which are more important than ever and more difficult to create in hybrid workplaces. Workplace happiness cannot exist if employees lack an authentic sense of belonging.
-
How and why it so valuable for employees to feel the connection between their efforts and purpose? Your organization has a mission and vision, how to begin evolving our employee value propositions and recruiting employees whose personal values align with the direction of the organization. it is difficult to increase employee happiness if we can’t align to peoples purpose in life.