Physicians' Occupational Health During Covid-19: A Qualitative Analysis of Systems Factors

Physicians are at risk for high rates of depression, substance abuse, suicide, and burnout, an occupational phenomenon resulting from chronic workplace stress. New working conditions imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic have exacerbated these occupational health burdens for physicians at a time when baseline levels of stress, burnout, and poor mental health were already overwhelmingly high.This onslaught of new (and potentially recurrent) acute stressors on top of chronic stress presents crisis of occupational health and moral integrity for physicians. There is an important need to (1) characterize the relationship between pandemic workplace conditions and adverse health outcomes (e.g. fatigue, stress, burnout, mental illness) and (2) identify work practices and organizational characteristics that promote occupational health and wellbeing and reduce the risk of such outcomes. To respond to these urgent and ongoing needs, we propose a novel exploratory study of the occupational wellbeing of physicians working on the front line of COVID-19 care.