The Dangerous Gap in Mental Health for Clinicians

A recent VITAL WorkLife report, “Bridging the Mental Health Gap Between Healthcare Leadership and Clinicians” (March 2025) reveals a gap in healthcare that’s too big to ignore.

95% of healthcare leaders believe they’ve provided sufficient mental health resources for their teams.

Only 21% of clinicians agree.

Both groups recognize that clinician mental health is in crisis — but urgency looks very different depending on where you sit:

80% of clinicians say the issue is urgent.

50% of medical and nursing leaders feel the same.

The gap isn’t about leaders not caring. It’s about competing priorities, organizational blind spots, and underestimating the realities of frontline work.

More than 70% of clinicians believe their leadership treats mental health as a low-priority issue. While 98% of leaders say their initiatives prioritize clinician well-being, only 39% of clinicians agree — many believe operational performance comes first.

Why this matters:

When clinicians feel unheard and unsupported, morale, retention, and patient care suffer. Resources alone won’t fix it, but alignment — more specifically, “aligned autonomy”, as my colleague Paul DeChant, MD, MBA describes it — will. Finding “aligned autonomy” for and with clinicians requires listening, co-creating solutions with clinicians, and acting with visible urgency.

Bottom line: This is more than a wellness issue. It’s a performance issue. Closing the gap between leadership intent and clinician reality is one of the most powerful levers leaders have to protect their teams, their patients, and their organizations.

Ready to transform your hospital or workplace?

Organizational Wellbeing Solutions was formed to provide a trusted partner for leaders in designing and executing a comprehensive plan to mitigate the major stressors facing healthcare leaders. A hallmark of our consultancy is correcting the mutual distrust and alienation between clinicians and C-Suite leaders, creating the strategic advantage of organizational resilience with highly engaged clinicians.

Schedule a call to speak directly with us to learn more.