Redeployment Engages Oncology PA Skills, Reduces Burnout

Redeployment led to less burnout in oncology physician assistants (PAs) during the COVID-19 pandemic according to recently published data, and this change may be attributed to finding more meaning in work that is challenging, according to a researcher from the study.

Eric Tetzlaff, MHS, PA-C, DFAAPA, an assistant professor and academic clinician at Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia, spoke with Oncology Nursing Newsâ about the findings from this research, explaining that administrative work is often less fulfilling for oncology PAs who are trained to work with and treat patients.

As Tetzlaff mentioned, redeployment may have been an opportunity for oncology PAs to reengage their skills as health care providers and avoid burnout that may have come with administrative tasks. Tetzlaff also noted that prior research associates certain characteristics, like high levels of grit, positively with PA performance when redeployed.

Data showed that financial factors and hours worked were not associated with burnout, which Tetzlaff said is because burnout often is a result of what a person is doing, rather than how much work they have or how they are compensated for it.

Transcript

Part of what we were doing at the time was really trying to understand how the pandemic, of course, was impacting APPs [advanced practice providers] in oncology, looking from a kind of general well-being standpoint.

This was part of a larger project that we’ve been doing looking at oncology PA burnout over the course of several years. So we added on questions that were very specific to the pandemic, some open ended questions, just kind of getting general feedback from APPS, which we thought was going to be meaningful; really trying to look at the role that PAs provided oncology, and then how the pandemic was influencing that.

PAs that had been redeployed were assigned to work in different departments during the pandemic—their rates of burnout were lower. We kind of hypothesized that certainly there could have been…a couple of different reasons, one of which being finding meaning in the work that you do.

One of the challenges that I think lots of people in medicine face is that their risk of burnout is higher when they’re not doing work that’s meaningful to them. Some of the non-patient facing tasks that we’re required to do—the administrative things, things that are kind of below our education and training—aren’t meaningful to us, and those things are associated with burnout.

Being redeployed during a pandemic, and really finding meaning in doing what you were doing at the time, could have been really valuable to people using skill sets and finding meaning in their work every day, despite the potential for that to cause lots of stress and anxiety for other reasons.

In another study of healthcare providers, they looked at grit and people that had been redeployed, and people who had higher levels of grit did better with redeployment. So it’s possible that people that were selected for being redeployed to other departments have characteristics that already predispose them to do well with this sudden change.

We thought that would be another potential interesting thing to explore in the future, not ignoring that the biggest issues are more system-related to burnout, and those are the things that really need to be addressed, most importantly, of the systems that we work in. But there’s certainly a rationale for also looking at some of the personal characteristics of providers as well.

It’s not consistent, but generally across several studies, it’s not just necessarily about how much you’re being paid, or even the number of hours that you work, necessarily. It’s what you do during that time. And people go into medicine for lots of different reasons; working with people and the satisfaction that you get with doing that is really high on people’s lists.

This transcript has been edited for clarity and conciseness.