Recent trends in health care provider well-being research

Although scholars and practitioners have focused on care provider burnout and well-being for many years, this focus has increased in the years since the COVID-19 pandemic began. Recent systematic reviews of the burnout literature have found that the major predictors of clinician burnout tend to be structural elements of the work environment: organization-level staffing problems, excessive workloads, work-life conflict, and challenges with electronic medical records (Li et al., 2022; Meredith et al., 2022). However, a recent meta-narrative review by Linzer and colleagues (2025) found that the most common interventions to reduce burnout were targeted at the individual level, for example, mindfulness training or stress reduction techniques, with little evidence for the long-term effectiveness of such strategies. It is unlikely that staffing problems and excessive workloads are likely to be reduced dramatically in the near future. However, a positive research trend we are seeing is the examination of several concepts that, if implemented and normalized in health care organizations, could serve to improve health care workers’ experiences even within this context. In other words, instead of asking, “how can we increase worker resilience in the face of untenable working conditions?” some scholars are now asking, “how can we enable workers to flourish at work?” (Linzer et al., 2025). For example, Jordan and colleagues (2025) evaluated early phases of a statewide project in Australia that utilized interventions based on the Institute for Healthcare Improvement’s (IHI) Joy in Work framework. Essentially, this initiative started with the identification of impediments to joy in the workplace and focused on removing them. Lai and colleagues (2024) systematically reviewed studies of proactive work behaviors in health care and found that proactive behaviors, especially worker job crafting (when workers change physical or cognitive aspects of their job tasks), were associated with numerous positive outcomes for workers. McClelland and Vogus (2019) identified specific examples of how organizations can infuse, sustain, and replenish compassion in health care organizations, which benefits both care providers and patients. In other studies, Kerrissey and colleagues (2024) found benefits of psychological safety to be associated with worker voice and feeling heard, and Rathert and colleagues (2022) found that psychological safety mediated the relations among a caring climate and emotional exhaustion, especially for nurses who were less empowered in their jobs. Finally, in this issue, Lee and colleagues (2025) found that team creativity was associated with higher job satisfaction and lower burnout in primary care workers, and this relation was mediated by perceived effectiveness of care delivery. While most of these studies were observational, they serve to build an evidence base of practical solutions that may improve health care worker well-being. At HCMR, we welcome work that continues and enriches this research trend, especially the development and evaluation of theory-driven interventions.