Purpose The nature of public healthcare highlights not only the need of understanding the role of emotional exhaustion in the relationship between employees’ job demands and desirable employees’ job attitudes, but also to adequate the combination of certain job resources and other organisational variables to moderate the employees’ feelings of emotional exhaustion. The paper aims to discuss this issue. Design/methodology/approach This viewpoint designs the theoretical approach that aims to understand the mediating role of emotional exhaustion among healthcare professionals and the capacity of certain variables to moderate it. The nature of the variables considered and the design of the theoretical model proposed highlights structural equation modelling as an optimal methodology to be used among a sample of European healthcare professionals. Findings Managers should be able to design strategies to mitigate, eliminate and prevent the causes of emotional exhaustion in public healthcare with the objective to improve the health and quality of life of healthcare professionals, and consequently the quality of the service provided to patients and their families. Originality/value This viewpoint highlights the importance of analysing the influence of employees’ emotional exhaustion on their attitudes in public healthcare. Direct relationships between emotional exhaustion and certain antecedents or consequences have been studied previously; however, studies analysing the mediating role of emotional exhaustion are very scarce and show mixed results. There are also few studies analysing the moderating role of certain job resources and other organisational variables in the relationships between employees’ job demands, employees’ emotional exhaustion and employees’ job attitudes.