Each time I have the privilege to work with a physician I’m amazed at the amount of people they have to manage. Patients, caregivers, nursing staff, fellow providers, hospital administration, community resource associates, private practice staff; the list goes on and on. The job is a stressful one with burnout rates that hover around 50% (a January 2019 Medscape study put it at 44%). Let’s stop a moment and consider the ramifications of that number – half of providers in this country who make a huge impact on the overall health of our lives, find their careers stressful and unsatisfying.
Researchers have called this everything from a crisis to an epidemic. For individuals responsible for nurturing physician relationships at hospitals, it’s important to understand and learn about this aspect of a physician’s life to ensure that you are meeting them where they’re at and not adding to their workload, but alleviating, even if on a small level, the burdens they carry with their job. Physician liaisons can, and should, see themselves as an important component in the effort to help physicians overcome burnout. But you can’t help with something that you don’t understand.
I recently shared a post on LinkedIn about job dissatisfaction in general as research shows that on average 70% of working adults don’t like their jobs. So that poses the question, are physicians special or they are they suffering from the same job dissatisfaction as everyone else? Another way to put it is, Are we all burned out?
In January 2016 the American Medical Association released a study on this very question and they found that physician burnout rates are higher than most occupations.
The study is interesting and worth reading but one quote in particular sticks out:
“Students start medical school with stronger mental health profiles than their peers,” said Christine Sinsky, MD, AMA vice president of professional satisfaction and an author of the study. “It is especially concerning, then, that through the course of medical school, residency and practice physicians come to experience much higher rates of emotional exhaustion and burnout.”
This means that by the time you establish a relationship with a physician for your referring partner efforts, the feelings of disconnect and burnout might be creeping in. Knowing this should change the way you interact with the physicians in your care.
In 2018 an article in Open Medicine was published that reviewed different strategies of intervention for physician burnout. It’s another interesting article and again worth the read, but there was one key takeaway that has application for this post: programs to improve physician team-communication skills have shown some efficacy in burnout reduction.
And so the question is worth asking, How well are you nurturing the line of communication with your providers? Is your communication effective and helpful, decreasing, rather than adding to, the workload of the providers with whom you interact?
If this is even a little bit intriguing, I recommend you read the articles referenced throughout and please share others you find that are helpful. As part of the physician support team you play an important role that’s bigger than the individual visits, phone calls and mailings. You contribute to an important support structure that opens up more space for deeper patient care and greater physician satisfaction.