Healthcare worker mental health, well‑being and safety 

Persistent burnout, elevated mental health symptoms, and higher turnover continue to strain health systems already facing workforce shortages, rising concerns about workplace violence, and significant policy and market uncertainty. Recent industry commentary on the One Big Beautiful Bill Act/H.R.1 has reframed clinician well-being as a critical risk mitigation and business priority, rather than a secondary concern. At the same time, the 2026 nurses strike in New York City highlighted safety and staffing as central clinician issues, demonstrating how unresolved workforce risks can escalate into labor action and operational disruption. Together, these forces underscore the need for integrated employer strategies that address mental health, well-being, and safety to protect healthcare workers and sustain care delivery.

The acute stress of the pandemic generated high rates of burnout, anxiety, depression, and symptoms consistent with post-traumatic stress among many clinicians and throughout the general workforce. Although some indicators have improved, the recovery has been uneven and incomplete.  Working in healthcare remains stressful and potentially harmful.

According to a survey in 2023 by the Physicians Foundation, six out of 10 physicians often have feelings of burnout, compared to only four in 10 prior to the pandemic. Mercer’s own research suggests something similar, as workload and life balance were the third highest ranked employee concern in our recent Inside Employees’ Minds survey.

Compounding these clinical concerns are persistent workforce shortages. In fact, an Illinois nurse’s union recently sued a large multistate hospital system for failing to follow staffing plans required under Illinois law leading poor staffing and neglected patients. Many systems have turned to rely on travel and agency staffing as shortages persist, especially for nursing support roles and in rural and safety net settings. That reliance can raise costs, disrupt team continuity, and increase workload for permanent staff, further accelerating burnout and undermining perceptions of safety. Meanwhile, reports of workplace violence in hospital settings and high-profile incidents in some markets have intensified clinicians’ safety concerns and contributed to moral distress. In 2024, National Nurses United reported that 81.6% of nurses had experienced some form of workplace violence in the prior year.

The recent large-scale nurses’ strike in New York City brought healthcare worker safety into the public spotlight. Nurses and their representative organizations publicly identified safe staffing, protections against workplace violence, and enforceable safety commitments as central bargaining priorities. The strike highlighted three interconnected realities: staff perceive that unsafe staffing directly jeopardizes patient care and professional standards; workplace violence and inadequate security measures heighten personal risk and emotional burden; and unresolved safety and staffing deficits can precipitate disruptive labor actions that threaten margins and continuity of care and produce reputational damage. These patterns are consistent in many regions of the country.

Several structural and organizational dynamics have hindered recovery and perpetuated risk:

• Workforce supply constraints: Training pipelines, geographic maldistribution, and attrition have limited replenishment of the workforce in many specialties and locations.
  
  
• Economic pressures: Wage competition, rising agency rates, and the need to contain costs place employers in difficult trade-offs between short‑term fiscal stability and long‑term workforce investments.
  
  
• Fragmented supports: Many mental‑health and well‑being offerings are underutilized or poorly integrated with operational supports that address root causes such as workload and staffing design.
  
  
• Cultural barriers: Stigma, confidentiality concerns, and lack of managerial capability to identify and respond to mental‑health needs impede access and early intervention.
  
  
• Cumulative trauma and moral injury: Ethical stressors from the pandemic and subsequent high-acuity care continue to erode professional meaning and engagement.

Mercer frames mental health, well-being, and safety as interdependent domains that collectively determine workforce sustainability and organizational performance. Addressing one domain in isolation may deliver limited, often temporary relief; sustainable improvement requires coupling benefits and clinical access with operational reforms and cultural change. To that end, the following steps may help drive meaningful change:

• Prioritize holistic integration: Combine clinical care pathways, benefits design, safety engineering, and work redesign.
  
  
• Implement data-driven targeting: Use claims, utilization, absence, engagement, safety, turnover data and other available data sources to identify hotspots and prioritize resources.
  
  
• Expand supports and benefits: Using data-driven insights, identify demographics most in need and provide impactful, personalized benefits for support. Reevaluate your Employee Assistance Program (EAP) offering on a regular basis.
  
  
• Optimize the workforce and redesign work: Use analytics to understand your labor supply and demand, today and in the future, to optimize teams and staffing schedules for desired outcomes. Redesign work and roles to allow clinical staff to practice at the top of their license and to reduce administrative burdens for these key roles.
  
  
• Measurement and accountability: Define KPIs (time-to-access for mental health care, utilization, safety incidents, turnover, agency spend) and link outcomes to leadership accountability. Develop interactive, always-on dashboards for real-time data and insights.
  
  
• Equity and access: Ensure frontline clinicians, night shifts, per‑diem staff, and contractors have confidential and convenient access to care.

Mercer’s practical support spans benefits design, operational strategy, safety interventions, leadership development, and measurement.

Mercer encourages healthcare employers to address mental health, well‑being, and safety in an integrated, data‑driven manner that pairs benefits access with concrete operational reforms, leadership development, and safety initiatives to achieve sustainable outcomes. Employers that deploy multifaceted strategies, like the ones mentioned above, may likely help reduce turnover and human capital spend, improve clinician safety and well‑being, and protect patient care outcomes.

The health of the healthcare workforce is both an ethical obligation and an organizational strategic necessity. In a challenging market environment marked by slow recovery from the pandemic, ongoing workforce shortages, and policy uncertainty, organizations that prioritize integrated approaches to clinician mental health, well‑being, and safety are best positioned to sustain quality care and financial stability. Mercer supports employers with pragmatic, measurable solutions that bridge benefits design, operational change, and leadership capability to protect clinicians and preserve access to care. Reach out today to start the conversation with a Mercer consultant.