Talking About Physician Burnout, and Changing the System
Dear Readers,
I have a new story at the Atlantic Health. It’s on burnout among physicians. The problem is clear: Too many have a hard time finding satisfaction in the workplace. Many struggle with work-life balance and symptoms of depression.
With many difficult situations, the first step in solving a problem is in acknowledging it exists. After that, you can understand it and, hopefully, fix it. Our health care system now, as it functions in most academic medical centers and dollar-strapped hospitals, doesn’t give doctors much of a break, or slack, or “joy,” as Dr. Vineet Arora suggested in an interview. You can read about it here. The implications for patients are very real.
Glad to see that research is ongoing about physicians’ stress, fatigue and depression. Thank you to Drs. Tait Shanafelt, Mary Brandt, Vineet Arora and others for addressing these under-studied and under-discussed issues in medicine. Through this kind of work, policy makers and hospital administrators might better know how to keep doctors in the workforce, happy and healthy.
ES
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Burnout?
How about when the Medical Board of California conducts a peer-review investigation and renders and expert opinion without obtaining chart records, severely misdiagnoses a case, and then snactions a physician based on that?
What about when the only board witness perjures himself multiple times, and an appeal court throws out all charges related to that witness, but THE MEDICAL BOARD IGNORES the APPEAL decision!
Yeah, there are lots of reasons for burnout. See http://medicalboardethics.wordpress.com