Asking doctors to become better at coping with burnout is not a strategy

Yvette Cooper was 30 years old when she first entered the Department of Health as a junior minister in 1999. Twenty-seven years later, she is back to lead it.

The NHS she returns to looks very different, but her longstanding interest in prevention, early intervention and how different parts of public services work together has a surprisingly contemporary feel today.

It also gives the new Health Secretary an opportunity to apply that thinking to one of the most persistent problems facing the NHS – burnout among the people who work in it.

As a junior health minister, Ms Cooper argued for a more comprehensive approach to health that brought together prevention, acute care, rehabilitation and social care. She was also associated with New Labour programmes including Sure Start, making the case for intervening earlier to improve outcomes and avoid greater costs later.

Similar thinking was evident much more recently in the Young Futures programme which brings services together from across mental health, policing, schools and local authorities to intervene with help for young people earlier.

The case for applying that preventative approach to the NHS workforce is compelling. The latest evidence for this makes uncomfortable reading.

Released the day after Ms Cooper was made Health Secretary by the Prime Minister, Andy Burnham, the GMC National Training Survey 2026 found that 61% of doctors in training were at moderate or high risk of burnout. Among trainers, the figure was 47%.

While there have been some green shoots of improvement in recent years, figures on this scale cannot sensibly be regarded as an unavoidable feature of working in medicine.

MDDUS’ own surveys tell a similar story, with nearly seven in ten doctors reporting they had experienced burnout or were living with its often-debilitating effects.

The consequences extend well beyond the wellbeing of individual clinicians. A workforce experiencing sustained exhaustion and excessive pressure has implications for retention, long-term absence, continuity of care and the ability of doctors to make complex, difficult decisions.

Ultimately, the conditions in which doctors work matter for patients too.

This is why resolving burnout needs to be considered as an integral part of NHS reform, rather than as a parallel workforce issue. For far too long, much of the response to concerns about doctors’ wellbeing happens once they are already struggling. A genuinely preventative approach needs to start further upstream.

Earlier this year, MDDUS brought together an expert working group from across Scottish healthcare to consider how this could change. Our Wellbeing by Design report set out how protecting doctors’ health and wellbeing could be designed into the way healthcare operates.

Its recommendations included safer workloads and rotas, protected rest, appropriate professional development time, sustained access to specialist support and better national measurement of burnout and doctor wellbeing. The report’s principles were later reflected in the annual report 2025 to 2026 by the Scottish Chief Medical Officer, Sir Gregor Smith.

Underlying all of this is a straightforward principle – if aspects of the way healthcare is organised are contributing to burnout, they need to be redesigned. Relying on individual doctors to become better at coping is not a strategy.

Every new Health Secretary arrives under pressure to improve NHS performance quickly. Ms Cooper will be no exception. Waiting lists, access to care, productivity, workforce pressures and public finances will all compete for her attention.

There will inevitably be demands for doctors and other healthcare professionals to work differently and for the NHS to deliver more. Yet the health of the workforce delivering that reform cannot become secondary to it.

If government wants sustainable improvements in productivity, then workforce wellbeing should be treated as one of the measures of whether NHS reform is succeeding. That means looking beyond individual initiatives and considering how decisions about staffing, workloads, rotas, training and service design collectively affect the people expected to deliver care.

Andy Burnham has spoken about creating a “preventative state”, with government intervening earlier rather than continually dealing with problems once they have reached crisis point.

There could hardly be a better place to apply that principle than the NHS workforce.

---

This page was correct at the time of publication. Any guidance is intended as general guidance for members only. If you are a member and need specific advice relating to your own circumstances, please contact one of our advisers.