Physician Resilience – a stronger canary is never enough

In my work with thousands of over-stressed physicians and over 175 healthcare organizations, I have learned one lesson over and over -

Resilience training alone is not sufficient to rein in the epidemic of physician burnout.

If you believe like I do that physicians are the canary in the coal mine of medicine.

Then it is clear the epidemic of physician burnout is an indictment of the conditions of the mine, not the resilience of the canary.

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In this blog post let's look at what happens when you run physician burnout in reverse. Here's what I mean.

An anchor, a tether, a life line and a way back to yourself

All doctors - everyone who sees patients for a living - need a solid anchor.

If / when you fall in, you can pull yourself back to shore hand over hand, make it to dry land and catch your breath.

The conversation about physician burnout is often dominated by the term RESILIENCE. We doctors need to be tougher, more elastic, stop complaining. 

I ran into an alternate way of looking at this issue via a blog post by Brenda Osieyo

Here is the quote that inspired her and me; about maintaining an anchor and a way back to yourself now that you have chosen the Lightworker's Path - working with sick, hurting, scared, dying patients and their families.

We know physician burnout is not because physicians lack resilience.

You are way more resilient than the average bear. Here's how we know ...

You survived med school and residency!
You are Still Here !

I use the word "survive" in that sentence very deliberately. If you look at the experience of Medical School and Residency from a pure energy perspective - think "The Force" in the Star Wars movies - your medical education was an exercise in SURVIVAL at that level.

Sure you learned a whole new vocabulary, a problem focused diagnostic skill set and how to recognize and treat most of the diseases in your specialty ... but all of that was predicated on your survival.

An article on physician suicide in junior Australian doctors this week contained the following bold statement:

'She was eaten alive'

The "con" of building physician resilience has left junior doctors vulnerable to mental illness and suicide by ignoring the systemic failures of the medical profession. Speaking at a session on mental health and wellbeing in Sydney alongside Health Minister Brad Hazzard, Ms Micaela Abbott said her sister was "eaten alive" by the medical profession. 

Dr. Chloe Abbott was 29 and a fourth-year doctor-in-training when she died in January, one of several recent suicides by doctors that prompted the Health Minister and the medical profession to act. 

"My family had really detested the term 'resilience'," Ms Abbott said, recounting her sister's fortitude as a champion swimmer who represented Australia in international competition. 

"That's not something you can do without resilience," she told the crowd of students about to join the profession that Dr Abbott's family and colleagues believed contributed to her death. "

It, of course, begs the question -- is the concept of Physician Resilience a con job to defend a hostile work environment?