Quality Shortfalls from Health Care Waste: A Unifying Root Cause of Occupational Distress

Abstract The current health care delivery system is perfectly designed to create high rates of professional distress in physicians, nurses, advanced-practice providers, and other health care professionals. In most organizations, a gap exists between the quality of care that professionals aspire to deliver and the quality of care actually delivered, which creates burnout. Poor-quality health care is fundamentally about waste, and leaders in the health care industry have primary accountability and responsibility for system waste. The following are five categories of waste in health care that people-centered organizations address: failures of care delivery and care coordination, overtreatment, administrative complexity, pricing failures, and fraud and abuse.