Healthcare Workers Face 'Zombie Burnout' as Resignations Drop Despite Deep Exhaustion

According to BambooHR's latest workforce report, 65% of surveyed healthcare workers are experiencing burnout, compassion fatigue, moral distress, or secondary traumatic stress, yet resignations have dropped to 55.9% of healthcare departures, down from 63.8% in 2022. That gap between widespread exhaustion and declining voluntary exits is what BambooHR is calling "zombie burnout": people whose energy and morale are depleted but who keep showing up anyway.

You're not fine. You're just stuck.

Here's the pattern I want you to sit with, especially if you work in a clinic, hospital, or care setting: staying in a job that is draining you does not equal resilience. It often equals a shrinking bandwidth where the perceived risk of leaving has grown larger than the pain of staying. The BambooHR data backs this up. Involuntary terminations have been climbing, and more than a third of new healthcare hires in 2025, 35.9%, left within their first year. People are not settling in; they are barely holding on.

Nicole Csiszar, Senior Director of HR Services at BambooHR, noted that with more departures now coming from the employer side, staying put can feel like the safest choice, even for someone running on empty, and a check-in only works if people feel safe telling the truth.

The cognitive load is not your fault, but it is your problem to name

The report also points to something worth noticing: 55% of healthcare leaders surveyed say staff burnout is the most pressing challenge at their organization, yet administrative and billing roles saw the sharpest rise in firings, jumping from 26.8% of healthcare departures in 2022 to 34% in 2026. An analysis of more than 200,000 job postings found no evidence that AI is replacing those workers; administrative and billing positions held flat as a share of healthcare hiring from 2019 to 2025. The pressure appears to be financial, not technological. That distinction matters because it means the trap of over-functioning, picking up the slack, absorbing the extra load to justify your position, is not going to be quietly solved by automation. It will be solved, or not, by structural decisions you do not control.

So what do you actually do with that? Start by refusing to confuse presence with health. Showing up depleted is not a badge of dedication. It is a signal that your nervous system is running on threat, and the cost shows up downstream in your sleep, your mood, and the quality of care you can offer. The question is not whether you can keep doing this. It is what you are willing to trade to keep doing it, and for how long.