Why Self-Care and Well-being Programs Won’t End the Burnout Crisis

Why Self-Care and Well-being Programs Won’t End the Burnout Crisis

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Erin Cahill: Welcome to CareSmartz360 On Air, a Home Care Podcast. I’m Erin Cahill, Account Executive at Caresmartz. How many times have you heard “just practice more self care” as the magical cure for burnout? Maybe you’ve been handed a wellness app, a scented candle, or a “helpful reminder” to meditate between back to back meetings. Well, today’s guest is here to tell you why that approach isn’t working and what we should be doing

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Erin Cahill: instead. Patrick Riecke is a nationally recognized burnout, expert, executive coach and speaker who’s on a mission to transform healthcare leadership after years of witnessing the crushing effects of moral distress and exhaustion. He didn’t just slap a self-care sticker on the problem. He dug deep to find real systemic solutions

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Erin Cahill: in his book “Let’s talk about healthcare burnout, a prevention and recovery guidebook”. Patrick reveals why traditional wellness programs are failing and what organizations actually need to do to create lasting change. Today, he’s here to break the cycle of burnout, challenge the status quo and offer a fresh perspective that goes beyond bubble baths and mindfulness apps. Get ready, Patrick Riecke is about to change the way you think about burnout. Welcome to the podcast, Patrick.

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Patrick Riecke: Thanks so much for having me, Erin. Glad to be here.

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Erin Cahill: So we’ll jump right into it. Self-care is often marketed as the solution to burnout. Yet the crisis persists. Why do traditional self-care and well-being programs fail to make a lasting impact.

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Patrick Riecke: Yeah, I think because they’re transactional. They’re not relational. They’re not advancing that conversation, you know, in healthcare we deal with really difficult things, and this has always been the case. You know this, that part’s not new. You know, nurses, doctors, techs, everybody working in healthcare has

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Patrick Riecke: has dealt with the most difficult things that happen in life, life and death, literally life and death in a death avoidance. Society, right? So, we’re some of the only ones looking death in the face, especially in the United States right now, and that just in of itself. If that was all that was difficult about healthcare would be enough to say that a bubble bath is not going to fix it right. It’s a process. It’s

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Patrick Riecke: what they’re facing every day what they’re experiencing, both with the patients tugging on their heartstrings, and the family tugging on their heartstrings. And then sometimes the families and patients doing different things to their emotions, you know, being very irritating or aggressive, or even harassing to them. So even if even if that’s all that was difficult about healthcare

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Patrick Riecke: and the Yoga class is not going to remedy that.

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Erin Cahill: And burnout is often seen as an individual problem. But you argue that it’s a systemic issue. What structural changes need to happen to truly combat, burnout in healthcare.

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Patrick Riecke: Yeah, that’s a big question. And there’s a whole litany of answers to those things. You know. I was saddened to read just a couple weeks ago about this story. I think it was in Pennsylvania, where a family member of a patient died. The family member had had actually really good interactions with the caretakers before that. But then something broke in them at that point, and they came in acted violence, you know. Shot a police officer tied up. The. You know. These things are

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Patrick Riecke: unfortunately top of mind, I think, especially for nurses. Anybody that’s in that patient care, that direct care setting. They’re in the home especially, you know, for our home care, coworkers going into these places that are less controlled. And so, there’s this system

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Patrick Riecke: of

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Patrick Riecke: the way that finance and everything is tied together with healthcare. And you know, am I going to be able to pay for this? What’s this going to mean for me. You know the fear that all of us have, even if we’re in a relatively financial stable situation, even if we understand healthcare. You know my daughter had a had an er trip recently, and she’s perfectly healthy, perfectly fine, you know, and really wonderful. But even at 16 years old, before the Emts came into our house, she said, Dad, this is going to cost a lot of money

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Patrick Riecke: at 16 years old, and we hadn’t put that on her at all. You know, we hadn’t said anything about it, but she knows that healthcare is tied to finance. And so, these constraints not just the quality controls. But the constraints of this is what you can and can’t do. This is what’s going to be approved. This is not what’s going to be approved. So you’ve got a you’ve got a you know, if I can be

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Patrick Riecke: sort of paint the picture. You’ve got a nurse who has decided to go into this field because she cares deeply about people. She wants to help people. She wants to be there for them, and then she’s told that won’t work. What you want to do, what you feel like, you need to do what? What? Medically, clinically, you’ve been trained to do. You can’t do that because it doesn’t work out on the financial, and it can’t be reimbursed. Well, that, you know, that’s a systems thing that goes all the way up to the

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Patrick Riecke: government, but then goes all the way down through our organizations, too. And it’s not a magic wand sort of thing. There’s no way to, just, you know, if there’s a way to change the whole healthcare system in the Us. Hopefully, we would have done it by now. But it’s something that that healthcare workers live with every single day. And then, when you’ve got individual agencies or healthcare organizations trying to pretend like that’s not a big deal, and we should just all deal with it and not have any feelings about it.

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Patrick Riecke: It’s just unrealistic, because our frontline coworkers, you know, whether they’re in the home, whether they’re in the clinic. They’re in the hospital. They feel it. They feel it every single day.

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Erin Cahill: Absolutely, and moral distress and ethical dilemmas contribute significantly to burnout. How can healthcare leaders create environments where professionals feel supported in these high stakes? Situations.

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Patrick Riecke: Yeah, I think a lot of

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Patrick Riecke: as a leader in healthcare, you know, in a hospital system for 10 and a half years you feel the temptation to whitewash things to bright side things of, oh, yeah, this is happening. But it’s okay, you know, and we need to chin up. And we need to be resilient, and we’ve got to. We’ve got to show up and do our work anyway, etc, etc. And a lot of that’s true. But I think honesty from leaders, even when you can’t change things, you know, being able to do 2 things. One is, you know, there’s sometimes you can see this is just this is super stressing out

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Patrick Riecke: coworker, and so is there an opportunity to let that coworker opt out of that situation. You know whether it’s a certain patient that’s just really, you know, maybe it’s even just something where it tugs at their heart that you know, this patient reminds me of my mom who just died, or something like that. And so, they feel that moral tension, that ethical tension, that emotional tension, or it’s something that they feel like this doesn’t align with my values. What we’re doing here

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Patrick Riecke: is totally off base with what I think we ought to be doing what I think I ought to be doing in the world, and maybe several people feel that. But you might be able to identify that one coworker. That this is this is just really profoundly affecting that person. So, offering them an opt out, obviously still have to provide services. But saying, you know, maybe it’d be okay for you to opt out of this one.

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Patrick Riecke: And then, when we can’t as leaders, we can’t offer an opt out, you know. Sort of things just are. The train’s on the track, and it’s coming through one way or the other most of the time. So, if you can’t offer that opt out, then taking a time out afterwards. And this is where leaders can just acknowledge and say, man, I’m sorry you had to do that. I’m sorry this happened. I’m sorry the system is this way, you know I can’t tell you how many times one of my teams responded to every patient death, every patient trauma.

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Patrick Riecke: So, you know, every day we’re coming in and during the pandemic, sometimes 15 deaths in a day. There’s nothing I can say or do that’s going to fix that for them, you know I’m not going to be able to say, well, you need to understand that. What am I going to say? This person just responded to 4 deaths in the past 6 h, but bringing them in and acknowledging it, taking that time out, say, today was a hard day, and I’m sorry that you had to do that.

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Patrick Riecke: It’s amazing how many times those coworkers would leave and say you helped me so much. Thank you for being there for me. I’m like I really didn’t do anything but just that minute for us leaders to give that acknowledgement

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Patrick Riecke: to not try to bright side it and whitewash it and say, this is just part of it. You just got to have a, you know, stiff upper lip. You got to be resilient, you know. Go home and take that bubble bath, or whatever like that’s not going to fix it. But you saying like I get it, I’m sorry, and I see what you’re having to do.

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Erin Cahill: Yeah. And if self-care isn’t the solution, what are the key leadership strategies that actually help prevent burnout and create a sustainable work? Culture.

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Patrick Riecke: Yeah. So, there was a funny quote from an er doctor in the middle of the pandemic. She left her job, and she was interviewed by the local news, and they said, You know what? In the middle of a pandemic, why did you leave your job? And she said, Well.

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Patrick Riecke: the work was hard, but the lack of support was really the main concern. She said. I think if somebody had been listening to me, I could have stayed in my job and been miserable for another 6 years. She’s, you know, she’s trying to demonstrate like the work is always going to be difficult. You’re not gonna you’re not going to stop. If you’re a part of a home health care team, a hospice team.

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Patrick Riecke: you’re not going to stop that work from being difficult, but the support, the listening. So, there’s really 2 primary mitigators of burnout, because we are going to experience some of this moral distress in healthcare. But the 2 primary mitigators. One is having friends at work.

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Patrick Riecke: You know how many, how many of us have stayed at a job for probably a little too long, because we like the people we worked with. You know, we’re spending time with them. But that really, that normalizes, you know, when you’ve got a friend at work, whether you’re just seeing each other at work, or you’re doing things outside of work.

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Patrick Riecke: When you go through something difficult, you feel like you’ve got somebody to talk to. They’re going to normalize those things and say, Yeah, yep, this is what we’ve all experienced. I’m sorry that that’s going on. I’m glad you’re still here that does a lot to decrease. So, leaders can facilitate those peer relationships. And then the second primary mitigator burnout

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Patrick Riecke: is that leader support that organizational support. And I’m afraid that a lot of leaders right now are telling themselves, well, we’re paying for this wellness app, and we’ve got Yoga classes on Tuesday at 6 pm. Or whatever. So, they should feel supported. Well, that’s Bs, you know, and not that the programs Bs, but that you saying they should feel supported. Because this is out, there is just not fair. What matters is, do they actually feel supported?

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Patrick Riecke: And you know, right now there’s some studies that just came out saying that 51% of American coworkers are looking for a new job. So over half of people are wanting to switch positions. And that’s the case. Certainly, in healthcare, too.

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Patrick Riecke: The top thing that they’re looking for in a new job, even above pay and an increase in pay and an increase in benefits is a better sense of well-being at work, a better sense of work-life balance, whatever work-life balance actually is right, but they? They want that.

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Patrick Riecke: So, there’s a lot of coworkers out there that if they could change jobs, even if the pay was the same and there was no pay increase, but they felt like there was an improvement in their work-life balance that they would, they would take that leap. The primary thing that that indicates whether or not these coworkers feel like the organization supports them? Are the listening skills of their direct leader. Will their direct leader bring them in.

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Patrick Riecke: shut their own mouths and listen to what’s going on and believe them. And you know, instead of trying to. Oh, no, it’s not that way, and talk them out of whatever they feel to listen to them. You know, again going back to that that emergency room, doctor she probably would have saved for another 6 years if she’d had a leader like that.

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Erin Cahill: Right.

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Erin Cahill: and you work with executives and healthcare leaders on building resilient organizations. Can you share a success story where team transformed its approach to burnout.

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Patrick Riecke: Yeah. So, what I just love seeing is the change conversation, you know, and to where? Because I come in. I’m there for a morning doing a workshop or doing a keynote with a lot of people in the room, and you never really know until afterwards like, did they even talk about this afterwards. So just heard from a colleague who is at a location where I went recently to say that conversation has continued. You know, CEO,

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Patrick Riecke: who for an organization I spoke with recently he shared that this was an all-leader meeting right after I talked about it, and he said, just said, how are we doing? And let the managers, you know, people that are a little bit closer to the ground tell him how they were doing so, I think

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Patrick Riecke: I mean, I’d love to see these places implement these huge well-being programs. But again, I think that the backbone of it is that conversation. So, seeing, you know, 2 weeks, 2 months, 2 years later, to see these organizations just still talking about and bring it up. Remember, when Patrick was here. He talked about how leaders who listen, you know, make such a big difference, or for coworkers prioritizing themselves and drawing boundaries, and that sort of thing can make a difference. So

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Patrick Riecke: I mean, my, that’s the time I’m most grateful is when I hear just that conversation is ongoing.

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Erin Cahill: Yeah, absolutely and last question for you, Patrick. Home care is facing staffing shortages, rising demand and evolving regulations. What do you see as the biggest challenge or opportunity for home care agencies in 2025.

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Patrick Riecke: Yeah, the thing I’m really scared about is not just 2025, but going forward because, you know, some of the some of the pipeline of especially nurses. There’s the pipeline is just not what it used to be, and you know, because this burnout affects not just people out there in the field, you know, working for these home care agencies, but it affects nursing students. It affects nursing professors. There’s not enough nursing professors wait lists for nursing programs. That sort of thing right now is really concerning not just for this year. But you know, for going forward.

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Patrick Riecke: you know, I think

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Patrick Riecke: for a long time. Of course, healthcare has just been a growing behemoth in the United States, and now it’s growing in pockets and shrinking in a lot of other pockets. And I think to accept whichever point you’re at a good friend, actually a family member who’s leading a new in-Home Hospice agency, and they’re growing leaps and bounds right now. They’re hiring.

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Patrick Riecke: having success at hiring. They’re taking on new patients. Their census is rising and so enjoy it right like. Enjoy that. That’s where you are for other agencies. You’re seeing a scaling back, and maybe your volume, your volumes change, your staffing’s changed, and to try to continue to do what you’ve always done with lower volume, with lower income, with lower, you know, lower numbers of staff

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Patrick Riecke: is, I think, when organizations really get into trouble because you’re trying to say, hey, this is what we did with a team of 90. Now, we’ve got a team of 72, and we’re trying to do all the same things. Without cutting back on the quality and the patient care, you know, are there extras that need to trim and to embrace that season, because when you don’t, that’s when that’s when the organization gets into real trouble.

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Erin Cahill: Yeah. Well, thank you so much Patrick for sharing your expertise. And to our lovely audience for tuning in. Until next time, I’m Erin Cahill, signing off.