Mind the Sentinel — Applying Patient-Safety Paradigms to Clinician Well-Being

This article calls for treating clinician burnout, impairment, and suicide with the same rigor applied to patient safety. The author draws on personal experience and the legacy of the patient-safety movement to argue that clinician well-being should be considered an institutional responsibility not just an individual burden. Applying tools such as sentinel-event reporting, failure mode and effects analysis (FMEA), and trigger tools, the article outlines how psychological distress among clinicians can be tracked, analyzed, and addressed as preventable workplace harm. The author proposes using burnout “bundles,” proxy indicators (e.g., staff turnover, after-hours logins), and real-time monitoring as systemic interventions. The article challenges health care organizations to treat clinician loss as sentinel events, shifting from passive acknowledgment to proactive change. It concludes that the same cultural shift that prioritized patient safety must now extend to protecting the workforce before "business as usual" causes more avoidable suffering

This article calls for treating clinician burnout, impairment, and suicide with the same rigor applied to patient safety. The author draws on personal experience and the legacy of the patient-safety movement to argue that clinician well-being should be considered an institutional responsibility not just an individual burden. Applying tools such as sentinel-event reporting, failure mode and effects analysis (FMEA), and trigger tools, the article outlines how psychological distress among clinicians can be tracked, analyzed, and addressed as preventable workplace harm. The author proposes using burnout “bundles,” proxy indicators (e.g., staff turnover, after-hours logins), and real-time monitoring as systemic interventions. The article challenges health care organizations to treat clinician loss as sentinel events, shifting from passive acknowledgment to proactive change. It concludes that the same cultural shift that prioritized patient safety must now extend to protecting the workforce before "business as usual" causes more avoidable suffering