How are YOU doing?
This is an important question for many reasons:
You can’t do your best as a clinician (doctor, nurse, pharmacist, etc) if you are not in a good place yourself.
The majority of clinicians are not doing well these days, not because of a lack of resilience or other so-called personal failing, but because of their workplace situation.
Healthcare workplaces are overwhelmed with drivers of burnout, the clinician job has become essentially undoable.
If we don’t recognize this, we can’t make things better.
AND you deserve better.
Despite all of the above, you persist at your work. Why?
Perhaps it’s because you don’t know what else are you going to do with your education and life’s passion.
Perhaps you are saddled with financial obligations you have no other way to repay – med school debt, a mortgage, saving for your kids’ education.
Or perhaps, like me, you can’t shake that sense that you want to be a part of the solution.
What does it mean to be a part of the solution?
It means you participate in, if not lead, change. Change is hard. Your life is already hard, and change will make it harder, at first. But it also gives you purpose. It can actually feel harder to allow yourself to fall victim to feeling that there is nothing you can do.
There is so much we can do! Here’s a partial list:
Learn about burnout, it’s manifestations and drivers. You can then understand the links between dysfunctions in your workplace and how those drive burnout.
Focus locally. Learn about the operations of your clinical setting. You can then see opportunities to fix things that aren’t working for you – the barriers and frustrations to caring for patients that you experience every day.
This will lead to new insights that you can share with your team and see if others share your interest in improving your practice setting.
If they do, you can start to take action together.
This is not your burden to bear alone!
Healthcare is a team sport. Changing care delivery is a team sport as well. The steps above are high-level suggestions to get you started exploring opportunities to improve.
There is hope. In subsequent posts I’ll talk about all of the above in more detail.
If you’d like to learn more sooner, feel free to reach out to me at paul@pauldechantmd.com