Burnout in Healthcare: Session Recap: Key Takeaways from David Weisman at NGPX 2025

2025, NGPX. PRESENTATION_Burnout in Healthcare and the Impact on Safety

Announcer: Afternoon, I am really excited to introduce this afternoon David Wiseman, the Chief Experience Officer at NYC Health and Hospitals in Queens. We actually met at a prior meeting, and I'm sure you, some of you in this room have heard him speak, so you were in for a treat and he's the perfect person for right after lunch.

David, the stage is yours.

David Weisman, Chief Experience Officer, NYC Health + Hospitals/Queens: No pressure.

All right. Good afternoon everybody. I know after lunch is a little bit of a tough time. Everybody's in that post carb relaxation state, and I might help you sleep a little bit better. So let me start by telling you who I am and where I work. So again, my name is David Weisman. I'm the Chief Experience Officer at New York City Health and Hospitals in Queens.

We're part of the largest, we are the largest healthcare, public healthcare system in the United States. I work at one of the 11 hospitals in our system, and the thing about our system that I think keeps me going is the fact that it's a safety net system and we're mission driven. We don't turn anybody away regardless of what language they speak, what country they come from.

Whether they can afford to pay. For me, it's everyone gets treated the same. I don't wanna know whether you are a millionaire or a homeless person should make no difference. You should get the same quality care. At Queen Hospital, we're considered one of the smaller community hospitals. We're not that small.

We're pretty busy. And the thing that I love most about Queens is the diversity. We take care of over 100 languages. Consistently. So it's both very challenging and very rewarding. Lemme talk a little bit about the journey before I get into the stress and burnout, which we're gonna spend a lot of time talking about.

So I became the Chief Experience Officer in February of 2020. Does anybody know what happened in March of 2020? So I don't know what it's like to be the chief experience officer. Outside of COVID. So I know that my predecessors who were in my role had a very different responsibility than I have in my role.

So when I took the job in 2020, we called it patient experience. We responsibilities were for taking care of the patients. When COVID hit, it was not about that we're not gonna take care of the patients, but we started to realize very quickly that our employees were. In a bad place. And it was a war zone.

And I can't describe what it was like to be in New York City during COVID. No one should have to experience what we experience. It was that awful. So we decided we were going, but there's a silver lining. The silver lining is we understood that employees matter just as much as the patients do.

Your first customer is actually your employee not your patient. If you don't take care of your employee they're not gonna be able to take care of the patient. So we pivoted. We no longer call ourselves patient experience. We now call ourselves care experience. And it's not just semantics, it's changing who our audience is.

So our audience is no longer just the patient. It's everybody. It's the staff, it's the patient, it's the community, it's the visitors, it's everybody. We also no longer call it per patient centered care. That was a big term a long time ago. We don't do that anymore either. It's now person centered care.

Again, more patient-centered care is a piece of it, but person-centered care is a little bit bigger and more encompassing. As we pivoted to care experience, these are just some of the initiatives we did and are still doing won, get into all of them. Two that I particularly like was the joy in work, which was a fun one.

If you've ever done joy in work it's what's the pebble in the shoe? And so when employees are having a bad time, it's not usually the boulders, it's usually the pebble in the shoe. And if you've ever walked with a pebble in your shoe, you know how uncomfortable it is. So when you ask an employee, what's the thing that prevents you from having a good day?

Some, if it's the pebble, we can remove the pebble boulders. You can't move so quickly, but pebbles, you can. So joy work was a fun one and helping heal us heal. I'm gonna spend a little bit more time talking about in a little while. So let's talk about stress and burnout. Since we pivoted to care experience, we needed to talk about employees and what we've known since COVID, and this is now five years after stress and burnout is real.

So when we talk about stress. I'm not talking about the kind of stress that we experience when you're taking a test or you're in danger. That kind of stress actually can be beneficial to you. But the kind of stress that just gets to you, that impacts you, it impacts your health. It doesn't make you feel good and the kind of stress that you experience when you think you've submitted your presentation to NGPX and you realize after you've gotten here that you haven't, that kind of stress, that unaddressed.

Repeated over time can lead to burnout. So stress is situational. Burnout is that prolonged stress, not taken care of. And when we think about stress, you can't avoid stress. It's not possible. It exists for all of us. So it's not about avoiding stress, it's about managing stress, finding strategies, coping strategies for dealing with that stress.

I put a balloon up there. 'cause most of us, we never get to fully deflate our balloon. We've always got something. The key is to prevent that balloon from getting more and more air. 'cause once that balloon gets full of air pop and we don't wanna do the pop we do much better with our cars. We do, we bring our cars in for routine maintenance.

We do oil changes. We bring it in periodically after a certain amount of miles. Why? Because you wanna maintain it versus fix it after it breaks. We don't do that for ourselves. We don't take care of ourselves and we allow that stress to continue to continue and it can lead to some negative consequences.

So when we talk about it today, I'm gonna talk about it from three different perspectives. I'm gonna talk about it from an organizational perspective. I'm gonna talk about it from a leadership colleague perspective, and then I'm gonna talk to you as individuals. Let's start with the organization. Why does this matter?

There's huge impacts and we'll just whip through these doctors, stressed, nurses, stressed, other healthcare professionals. Also stressed, but not at that level. We're talking almost 50%. Nurses are telling us they need help. They need support. They're struggling like they've never struggled before.

Physicians are committing suicide at rates that we've never seen before. In fact, we had several in our system. Part of that is, I think physicians in particular tend to hold things in. They're the superman, and you can't reveal things that are emotional. You block it down, but at some point it takes its toll.

So we're experiencing physician burnout and suicide. We're seeing, I think I went too far. No, we're good. Burnout causes safety issues. You're two times likely to have a negative incident and two times likely to have patient dissatisfaction. Even worse, we're five times more likely to experience nurses in particular omissions in care from stress and burnout.

That's dangerous and that's scary. 50% of Americans have said they've experienced healthcare. Provider that was not compassionate. 64% of Americans of patients said they've had a negative experience with that lack compassion. That should not be, we should not be in a field where patients are telling us we lack compassion.

It's unacceptable, but it is what it is. And part of the reason is the burnout. Because what burnout leads to is decreased engagement, decreased compassion increase in that disconnectedness. What happens? Risk factors. There's lots of reasons that burnout happens. It's not just about the hours, it's about the workloads.

It's about the lack of support. There's a lot of things that trigger us to experience burnout. Less staff, less resources. What does that lead to? It leads to staff being overworked, leads to what? Stress and exhaustion and what does that lead to? Burnout. And then what happens? They start leaving and then it circles right back up to the top again where you have less staff and it becomes this vicious cycle of not being able to address the stress and getting worse and worse.

This is one of my favorite slides, and I got this from Press Gaius, about how patients experience care and at the pinnacle of it is empathy, but I will argue that our staff need the same thing. It's not just that our patients need empathy. Our staff need it too. It's not that those other things aren't important, but at the very top of what employees need is empathy.

And studies have shown that 85% of employees will, and this is not just in healthcare, will tell you that they will more likely stay in a role if the employer cares about them. 77% of employees say that they would not wanna work for a company that doesn't care for their wellbeing. And 83% said that wellbeing is just as important as salary, wellbeing, taking care of your employees.

So who's at risk? We're gonna flip through these quickly. Emergency room, ICU staff, they experience tr trauma every single day. They're not robots. The people who work in ICU in the emergency room experience very traumatic things each and every day. If you don't address that it impacts you. If a neonatal in the nicu, a baby passes, you think the staff don't have emotional reaction to that.

It's not just go back to work and pretend that nothing happened. We have to address that. We have to be proactive. There's an impact if you don't people who are just starting their career, nah, I'm not doing this. This is not good for me. Not gonna stay. We have mental health clinicians again, high stress, high pressure, no relief.

The frontline workers too. There's nobody who's immune to the stress of working in healthcare. It's not good. So let's talk about the organization. How can we recognize that your workforce is stressed through call outs, low morale, less productivity, reduce quality of work. It's not good, but what can we do about it?

And that's what I'm gonna talk about real quick. This is where I'm gonna talk about H three. So H three for us was called Helping Healers Heal. We developed it during COVID as a way of dealing with the trauma that was experienced after the, everyone was going through very difficult time, but we've changed it.

We revamped it. Now it's a proactive program about employee wellness. And we must allocate as an organization, resources to employee wellness. It has to be a priority. If you don't do that, wellness is not going to happen by itself. So we've done things like H three and through our H three. We do wellness rounds, we do peer support, we do pet therapy.

We, we have some music for the soul concerts at the end of every operations huddle in the morning at eight 30 every day, there's about 90 people on the call. We end that call with a inspirational thought of the day. I thought it was useless and I said, ah, we need to stop doing that. No one's paying attention.

It was my team that was doing it. The day we stopped it, I got about 15 calls saying what happened to the thought of the day. It was meaningful to people. So we do it every single day. Wellness. So we talk about wellness. What is wellness? Eight Dimensions of wellness. There's wellness comes in all kinds of ways.

It's not just physical wellness. Wellness can be emotional wellness financial wellness, academic wellness. We try to tackle each and every one of these things. And I will tell you that some of them don't cost any money at all. 'cause we're resource restricted, but we find ways to make it work. I'll give you some examples.

We have financial wellness. We have academic wellness. Our staff told us that they wanted to walk at lunchtime. This is not hard. We got a group together and they just started walking. We have a one mile radius, a perimeter of our campus takes 20 minutes. If we do a 20 minute walk, it's not competitive.

It's not fast. It's just a casual stroll to get out, decompress, and be with your colleagues and our staff loved it. They asked for outdoor dining. How hard is that? We put a few picnic tables outside easy. It's what they wanted. It was an easy ask. It was an easy fix. Again, it's about employee wellness. We have a chapel.

We're very fortunate. We have a priest that does mass. Once or twice a week, we have a group of employees that created their own prayer group. It's what they wanted to do. We just give them the space and they do it a couple of times a week. Once a year we do a day of recess. We play, we go outside and we have a good time 'cause we deserve it and we need it.

And it's all put together by our wellness team. And by the way, we have two people who are employed at our facility. That are wellness people who do not do anything patient facing. It's simply about taking care of the employees. So giving the resources to employee wellness matters. We built wellness rooms, converted empty spaces or unused spaces into wellness rooms, but not everyone can get to a wellness room.

So what we did was we put wellness rooms, little ones on each unit. So a nurse who can't get away can take five minutes and escape and go into a wellness room. We do pet therapy. Love the pet therapy. It's not just for patients, it's for us. And yes, that is a miniature horse in the first picture with our dog, Sophie.

We do music for the soul concerts once a month for two hours in our lobby. We have live professional musicians come and perform, and it's really very soothing. It's very comforting. Even if you can't sit and listen, it's just passing and taking a moment to pause and de-stress. So let's talk about you as leaders.

Why does it matter as a leader to worry about stress and burnout? It matters because we talk about the productivity, the quality of work, but leadership has to walk the walk. It can't be simply do what I say, not as I do. I had a chief of medicine who came to me and said, nah, we don't have to do this.

You just give them a script and tell 'em what to do. And they'll do it. And I said, no, we have to lead by example. We have to show them what we want our employees to do. 'cause if we don't show them, they won't know. And we never agreed, but I'm still there and he's not. So how can we demonstrate, how can we address to our employees that we care?

I will argue that one of the ways to do that is with empathy. We've been talking about empathy and kindness over and over. I've heard it over the last few days. One of my favorite quotes is it's about kindness. Everyone you meet is engaged in a battle that you know nothing about. So be kind always.

It's not hard, but yet we struggle. We had a doctor during COVID, our emergency room physician, who called the command center. We were working in the command center at the time in tears, crying hysterically that all her patients were dying and she couldn't do anything and she's, I don't know what to do.

This is our lead physician in the emergency room. In tears, hysterical. I do not have the ability to fix that. It was very hard for us, and even listening to her cry was very painful for me. But we certainly have the ability to be empathic. And understand what you're going through and be there to support them and get them through it.

So we talk about empathy, we talk about compassion. What's the difference? Empathy is putting yourself in someone's shoes. We can do that. Compassion is the action that you take to address the empathy. What are you doing? How are you being compassionate to your staff? I'm gonna show you a few quick examples.

Thanksgiving last year. We came in me, the CEO and the COO, we served lunch to every single employee who gave up their Thanksgiving to be with our patients. They sacrificed being with their family to be with our patients. We made sure that they all got a hot lunch that day. Every single person Christmas time, who doesn't love a Santa, especially this Santa, he's really cool.

We dressed up in costume. We didn't know what, how, what the reaction would be. People loved it. It created a spirit, a feeling of really feeling good and happy. And so we rounded as it we had an ugly sweater contest and they wheeled us through this with a sleigh through the lobby, and everybody wanted to take pictures with us.

Staff, patients. Everyone wanted a picture with Santa and Mrs. Claus. Everybody wanted pictures. Almost everybody, I want to take the last few minutes. To talk to you. Forget about the organization, forget about leadership. I want to talk to you. What's the impact of burnout and stress on you? If you don't take care of your stress, you will potentially experience some very serious physical and mental issues.

Real ones, they're not made up, they're real. I will share a very personal story. I had a very toxic leader for several years. I refused to stop doing the job that I love doing for the person who was trying to make my life absolute misery, but I paid a price for that. I wound up getting something called diverticulitis.

Three times painful. If you've never heard of it, it's awful. It's with the intestine and pockets, and sometimes you need surgery. I didn't need surgery, but I needed medication three times the day they retired. I've never had it again. Can't tell me that stress doesn't cause physical issues.

We make all kinds of excuses why we shouldn't take care of ourselves. I don't have the time. Busy. Let me tell you, self-care is not, it's not selfish, it's foundational. If you don't take care of yourself, you can't take care of anybody else. When you're in an airplane and the they if there's an emergency and the air comes down, what do they tell you?

Put yours on first, then take every take care of anyone else who can't. That's not selfish. That's making sure you're able to take care of other people. But we don't do a good job of that. And now I'm gonna tell you one more thing. We're all great at what we do. Our jobs can't do without us. They need us, so we can't take care of ourselves wrong.

Every one of us is replaceable, as good as we are, we're absolutely replaceable. Your job, your organization will. This is a little bit cold, but they'll step over you and keep going like you never existed. It's the reality. So who's responsible for taking care of you? It's you. And if you don't do that, you're not gonna be able to take care of anybody else.

So you need to focus on you. Don't worry. Obviously I'm not telling you not to worry about your job. You need to worry about your job, but you come first, please take care of yourself. And my final thought is that every moment matters. Don't waste your moments. We don't know what tomorrow brings.

I've been in New York now for many years. I was there when nine 11 happened and I was there for COVID. And how many people leave for work that morning? Things aren't right with people at home. You didn't, you we'll take care of this later. Guess what? There was no later. Take care of it. Now, if you need to sell, tell someone how you feel about 'em.

Tell 'em don't wait. If you need to express gratitude, express it. Don't wait. There's no tomorrow guaranteed. How many people never got to say goodbye 'cause they didn't make it right before? Maximize your moments. Everyone matters. If you don't do that, you'll be sorry. Take advantage of every opportunity.

When I say make the most moments, I'm not telling you to be hedonistic. It means maximize every opportunity. Don't waste them. They're precious and they're yours. Thank you.

Announcer: Wow. Thank you. That was powerful and great and fun work that you're doing for your teams.