What Actually Helps Health Care Professionals With Burnout?
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Estimated reading time: 3-4 minutes
Summary:
Burnout interventions do not work equally well for every health care professional. A systematic review examined 99 randomized and cluster-randomized trials involving 9,330 health care professionals.
Professional coaching showed promise for physicians, with reductions in emotional exhaustion and depersonalization, although the certainty of evidence ranged from low to moderate.
Mindfulness-based interventions were less convincing for physicians, but they appeared to reduce emotional exhaustion among nurses and midwives and showed benefits in mixed groups of health care professionals.
Coaching may help physicians translate awareness into action by identifying the causes of burnout, clarifying priorities, strengthening boundaries, overcoming barriers, and creating realistic plans for change.
Duration may be important. Coaching and mindfulness interventions generally lasted longer than four weeks, suggesting that sustained support may be more useful than a single lecture or short workshop.
Individual interventions cannot replace organizational change. Workload, staffing, leadership, autonomy, administrative burden, and workplace culture must also be addressed.
The most appropriate burnout intervention depends on the individual, profession, underlying causes, and context. Effective support should be personalized rather than based on a one-size-fits-all approach.
Not every burnout intervention works equally well for every health care professional.
A new systematic review and meta-analysis published in Annals of Internal Medicine offers an important insight into this question.
Collett and colleagues analyzed 99 randomized and cluster-randomized controlled trials involving 9,330 health care professionals to evaluate the effectiveness of individual-level interventions for burnout.
The findings are particularly interesting when we look at physicians separately from other health care professionals.
Coaching may have an important role for physicians
Among physicians, professional coaching was associated with reductions in emotional exhaustion and depersonalization.
The effect on emotional exhaustion was a standardized mean difference (SMD) of −0.37, while depersonalization improved by an SMD of −0.30. The certainty of evidence was considered low for emotional exhaustion and moderate for depersonalization.
In contrast, the evidence for mindfulness-based interventions among physicians was less convincing. The authors concluded that mindfulness-based interventions may not reduce physician burnout based on the available evidence.
Interestingly, the findings were different among other health care professionals.
Among nurses and midwives, mindfulness-based interventions were associated with a significant reduction in emotional exhaustion. Mindfulness also appeared beneficial in studies involving mixed groups of health care professionals.
This suggests that there may not be a single intervention that works equally well for everyone.
Why might coaching help physicians?
Physicians generally know that sleep, exercise, healthy nutrition, relationships, and recovery are important.
The problem is often not a lack of knowledge.
The challenge is translating that knowledge into sustainable action while managing clinical responsibilities, administrative demands, family obligations, and professional expectations.
Coaching provides a structured and individualized process to help people identify what is contributing to their burnout, clarify priorities, overcome barriers, establish realistic goals, and create an actionable plan.
For a physician, that might mean asking:
What is actually driving my burnout?
What can I change, delegate, or eliminate?
Where do I need better boundaries?
What has become misaligned with my values?
What small changes can I realistically sustain?
In other words, coaching can help move from awareness to action.
Duration may matter
Another important observation is that both professional coaching and mindfulness interventions were generally longer than four weeks.
This makes intuitive sense.
Burnout typically develops over time. It may take months or years of chronic stress, excessive workload, insufficient recovery, or loss of control to reach a significant level of burnout.
A single lecture or workshop may increase awareness, but meaningful behavioral change may require ongoing support.
The study does not establish the ideal duration of coaching. However, it suggests that interventions sustained over time may be more effective than very brief approaches.
Individual interventions are only part of the solution
This study should not be interpreted as saying that burnout is simply an individual problem.
It isn't.
Workload, staffing, organizational culture, leadership, autonomy, electronic health records, administrative burden, and other workplace factors can significantly contribute to burnout.
Individual interventions cannot replace organizational change.
At the same time, waiting for organizations to change before individuals take action leaves many people without practical tools to protect their well-being.
We need both.
One size does not fit all
Perhaps the most important message from this study is that burnout interventions should be individualized.
Mindfulness may be helpful for some health care professionals. Coaching may be particularly useful for physicians. Other interventions may be appropriate depending on the individual's circumstances and the underlying drivers of burnout.
Two people can have similar burnout scores but completely different reasons for getting there.
The right question may therefore not be:
“What is the best intervention for burnout?”
Instead, we should ask:
“What intervention is most appropriate for this person, in this professional context, and for how long?”
That shift, from a one-size-fits-all approach toward individualized, evidence-informed interventions, may be an important step forward in addressing burnout among health care professionals.
Reference: Collett G, et al. Efficacy of Individual-Level Interventions to Mitigate the Risk for Burnout Among Health Care Professionals: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis of Randomized Controlled Trials. Ann Intern Med. 2026;179(1):51-66. doi:10.7326/ANNALS-25-00469.
