Physician Burnout may cost the US Healthcare System $4.6 Billion per  year, but does this data point help lower the stress of a single front line doctor?

 A new study out in Annals of Internal Medicine this week uses a cost-effectiveness approach to estimate the annual economic burden of physician burnout on the US Healthcare System. $4,600,000,000 per year was their estimate. The free floating anxiety in the headlines was palpable.

I just wish we could focus on useful research findings like Corey Lyon and his APEX Project ... and let's give real-world burnout prevention tools the same headlines as this fluff. 

I will classify this as an INTERESTING AND USELESS factoid.

I work directly with physicians and healthcare organizations every day to prevent burnout and am pretty sure this number is useless in my line of work. 

It is in the same category as knowing Pi to 10 digits (3.141592653) or how may toothpicks you would need to lay end-to-end to get from Milwaukee to Chicago (2,882,880).

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This highly-suspect projection has zero chance of improving the quality of life of a single front-line physician for the simplest of reasons ...

The World Health Organization may have just classified burnout as a disease. I am pretty sure that would be a Very Bad Thing for over-stressed physicians!

Headlines today on the recently concluded WHO meeting in Geneva, are blaring news that burnout has been reclassified as a disease. Here is my input on that potential development.
[this story has been updated, see below]

Let me say right up front that burnout is a NORMAL RESPONSE to overwhelming stress in any person who takes on the role of a helper. For physicians, that role is the core of our professional activities, encapsulated perfectly in the mantra, "The Patient Comes First". 

An official disease designation is a Big Deal ... and Not in a Good Way, IMHO

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Burnout is much more often a diagnosis that the WORKPLACE is SICK ... NOT THE DOCTOR! This potential disease designation would drop all burned out physicians into the gaping maw of the mental health industry -- rather than continuing current trends focused on making workplace changes to lower stress.

Here is my fear

Stop Physician Burnout - you just do not party nearly enough

In this post let me show you a quick, fun, powerful method to build a more supportive culture among any group of physicians - a method most groups completely ignore.

Because of the power of an active Social Calendar (partying more), this is one of the four components of our Quadruple Aim Blueprint Strategy for Corporate Wellness.

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Whenever I am in front of a room of 100 - 200 - 300 physicians delivering a live training, I always ask them this question ...

"How many of you can look around the room and see someone you have never met before?"

How many hands do you think go up?

Compassion Fatigue is one of the psychological consequences of being a doctor

Losing the ability to feel empathy, sympathy and compassion for your patients is a constant risk for all of us.

This is a consequence of your choice to become a Lightworker years ago.

That choice guaranteed our exposure to the trauma, tragedy and agony of our patient's struggles. No one teaches you that compassion is a finite resource that must be regularly refilled or physician burnout is inevitable for all of us.

In this blog post, let me show you

• why doctors are at unique risk for Compassion Fatigue and burnout ... it is the result of a decision you made long ago
• how to recognize Compassion Fatigue
• the four phases of Compassion Fatigue – where do you stand?
• a specific method to restore your Emotional Energy Reserves and recover from your own Compassion Fatigue
• and finish with a set of online Compassion Fatigue resources if you would like more tools or to study this important topic in more detail

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The Origin of this Lightworker’s Dilemma

Let’s start at the beginning
– the point in time where you chose to become a doctor in the first place

You remember that fork in the road?

April was a busy burnout prevention training month at TheHappyMD.com

Here are the dates and trainings we delivered to well over 1000 doctors in April of 2019 -- and here is our speaking/training page where you can get us started customizing a training for your people. 

Whether you are looking to stop physician burnout or allow us to train your physician wellness champion - we offer the healthcare industry's best training experience. Over 170 organizations and well over 30,000 doctors trained to date. You can be next: Click Here to Learn More.

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1) For SVMIC - State Volunteer Mutual Insurance Company 

We delivered Burnout Proof Live Workshop to SVMIC individual and group malpractice insurance clients a total of  12 times in:

Chief Wellness Officer - CWO - does your organization need one?

It is all the rage in leadership circles these days. The mucky mucks are all in agreement. If your organization is serious about preventing burnout, the very first thing you need to do is appoint a Chief Wellness Officer - and watch the angry, dark clouds of burnout lift - revealing the rainbows and unicorns of a happy, healthy physician workforce.

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This is Magical Thinking of the highest order

Let's drink the CWO KoolAide for just a moment ... to recognize it is just another version of checking a box.

This C-Suite executive will be your savior, your cavalry cresting the ridge, your knight in shining armor, your hero among the bean counters. At the very least, they should be able to stop the rest of the C-suite from hammering the doctors into little tiny pieces.

Would your people or your organization actually benefit from installing a Chief Wellness officer - CWO

The answer of course is "IT DEPENDS"
[ And for 99% of healthcare organizations a CWO is a distraction from building a wellness program in the first place ]

Round On Your People

It is as simple as that ... and here is the monumental tragedy of current healthcare leadership behavior.

I have asked thousands of physician leaders - both physicians and non-doctor senior leaders - if they schedule time to round on or shadow their people. Their response is always the same. Just yesterday in a room of 30 CEO's and CMO's from independent groups around the USA, I asked that question -- and how many hands went up do you think??

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Quadruple Aim Physician Leadership Retreat
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ZERO - not a single one

The next words out of my mouth were "shame on you." I am sure that is something they have never heard from a speaker before -- and yet they knew my critique was spot on.

Two Leadership Consequences of NOT Rounding

What about the doctors who don't return the burnout study - the non-respondents?

Are they different than the ones who do respond ?Specifically, are they more or less burned out than the people who send in the survey the first time they are asked??

For years this has been the biggest mystery surrounding any survey of physician burnout rates. It is a question I field often at our live training events. Up until now I have not been able to quote any research that attempted to answer the question.

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Well now we have answer

The recent edition of the original physician burnout Super Study we wrote about in the last blog post contains a hidden second wave of surveys that solves this fundamental mystery. 

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Related:
The Fatal Flaws in the Burnout Survey Industry
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This survey modification actually gives us three important new data points:

Mayo's physician burnout super-study finally released their third round of data from the 2017 survey.

This was that infamous first study documenting burnout rates above 50% in US physicians in Mayo Clinic Proceedings using US physician burnout surveys performed in 2011 and 2014 compared to burnout in the general US population.

It is probably the single most important data point in the birth of the movement to track and address burnout in physicians. That movement has spread far and wide since 2011, culminating in the current wave of industry-wide confabs like the NAM Action Collaborative on Clinician Wellbeing and Resilience.

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Since 2014 we have been waiting patiently for that third round of surveys to report out. Show us the 2017 data please, please, please ... and here it is.

It's not Physician Burnout dammit - it's Moral Injury, Victim Shaming, Human Rights Abuses, Right?

There is a wave of righteous indignation sweeping the online discussion of physician burnout recently. It is spawning a series of increasingly outraged new terms to define burnout as a symptom of systematic, deliberate abuse perpetrated by "the system".

Some even go so far as to accuse physician burnout coaches of "cannibalizing the corpses of their colleagues" - one of the more inappropriate and creepy examples of alliteration I have heard in a while. But hey, jump on the bandwagon.