The National Academy of Medicine's National Plan for Health Workforce Well-Being
Background
The National Academy of Medicine (NAM) Action Collaborative on Clinician Well-Being and Resilience launched in 2017, bringing together more than 130 organizations — health systems, professional associations, payers, accreditors, and federal agencies — with the goal of reversing trends in clinician burnout through coordinated, multi-sector action. After nearly six years of collaborative research and deliberation — informed by nearly 2,000 public comments — the collaborative published the National Plan for Health Workforce Well-Being.
The National Plan is significant because it represents the broadest multi-sector consensus document on healthcare workforce well-being in U.S. history. It moves beyond describing the problem to prescribing concrete actions for specific actors — health systems, payers, regulators, educators, and policymakers — organized around six interconnected pillars of change.
Sources
- National Academy of Medicine, 'National Plan for Health Workforce Well-Being,' 2022
- NAM Action Collaborative on Clinician Well-Being and Resilience
Key pillars
The six pillars of the National Plan address well-being from multiple angles: (1) creating positive work environments by reducing administrative burden and improving organizational culture; (2) creating positive learning environments that protect trainees from the culture of stoicism that perpetuates burnout; (3) supporting mental health and reducing stigma by removing barriers to care and building peer support; (4) investing in research on well-being causes and interventions; (5) addressing the policy and payment environment that creates structural drivers of burnout; and (6) acting on data to continuously improve well-being measurement and response.
The plan explicitly calls on health systems to take responsibility for well-being as an organizational outcome — not to outsource it to Employee Assistance Programs or treat it as an individual problem. The physician replacement costs cited in the plan ($500,000 to over $1 million) make the financial case for this organizational responsibility concrete: burnout is not an HR issue, it is a strategic and financial one.
Sources
- National Academy of Medicine, 'National Plan for Health Workforce Well-Being,' 2022
- National Academy of Medicine
What it means for healthcare organizations
For health system leaders, the National Plan provides both a mandate and a framework. The mandate: organizations that do not actively invest in clinician well-being are accepting a financial, quality, and safety risk that is well-documented and increasingly indefensible. The framework: the six pillars give health systems a structured lens for assessing where their current well-being investments are strongest and where they are absent.
Practical implementation aligned with the National Plan starts with continuous well-being measurement (pillar 6: act on data), connects to administrative burden reduction and culture improvement (pillar 1), and extends to stigma reduction and access to mental health care (pillar 3). ImprovementFlow's well-being program infrastructure is designed to operationalize these pillars within the operational systems health organizations already use — embedding well-being monitoring in clinical workflows rather than layering it on top of them.
Sources
- National Academy of Medicine, 'National Plan for Health Workforce Well-Being,' 2022
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