Impact of Working From Home on Addressing Practitioner Burnout and Work-Life Balance in Mental Health.

While the demand for mental health services is growing, a practitioner shortage and high rates of burnout limit the capacity of the system to provide care. The COVID-19 pandemic led to a shift toward increased telehealth use, presenting an opportunity for mental health practitioners to adopt flexible workplace policies, such as working from home, that are more common in nonclinical environments. This article discusses the impact of working from home on practitioner burnout, satisfaction, and work-life balance, which may inform recruitment and retention strategies for health care organizations.

Preventive Ethics Through Expanding Education.

Healthcare institutions have been making increasing efforts to standardize consultation methodology and to accredit both bioethics training programs and the consultants accordingly. The focus has traditionally been on the ethics consultation as the relevant unit of ethics intervention. Outcome measures are studied in relation to consultations, and the hidden assumption is that consultations are the preferred or best way to address day-to-day ethical dilemmas. Reflecting on the data from an internal quality improvement survey and the literature, we argue that having general ethics education as a key function of ethics services may be more important in meeting the contemporaneous needs of acute care settings. An expanded and varied ethics education, with attention to the time constraints of healthcare workers' schedules, was a key recommendation brought forward by survey respondents. Promoting ethical reflection and creating a culture of ethics may serve to prevent ethical dilemmas or mitigate their effects.