What exactly is physician burnout? It is the feeling a medical professional gets when the everyday grind that is required in the profession becomes too much and the exhaustion felt overcomes any sense of personal accomplishment. Simply put, it is when you cannot take it anymore. A 2018 Survey of America's Physicians: Practice Patterns and Perspectives, conducted on behalf of The Physicians Foundation by health care consultancy Merritt Hawkins, found that 78% of physicians surveyed suffered from burnout. So, if you are feeling burnout, you are not alone.
Ways to prevent burnout
There are hundreds of ways to deal with burnout. However, burnout prevention and management are achieved primarily by the following:
- Life balance;
- Improving time management efficiency; and
- Delegation.
Life Balance
This is fairly broad and differs significantly from person to person. However, failure to achieve life balance usually is a function of one's inability to set boundaries between work and life. You need to be able to shut work off to be able to have a work-life balance. Find a ritual that makes you happy and keeps you sane. Walk the dog every night at a certain time, go golfing once a week or have a set time to read a bedtime story to your kids. There are hundreds of strategies and they will vary from person to person. The key is to turn off work and find something that makes you satisfied.
Keeping up with everyday life, outside of work, is a challenge. It is common to start your week off with hundreds of tasks that were not taken care of over the weekend. And even more are added to your list as the day goes by. You might have a calendar set up at work, but what about at home? Once a week, sit down with your family and plan the week ahead. This will prevent you from forgetting about your son's baseball game or spouse's dentist appointment.
Time-management
Work is becoming overwhelming and life is getting more complicated — how can you possibly keep up? Improving on time-management is incredibly important. Prioritizing workloads, making sure your office is running efficiently and not wasting time on tasks that can wait until a later time are some of the best ways to improve time-management.
Delegation
Allowing administrative staff to take on more tasks, assigning patient work to other physicians and making sure that each member of the team is working to their full potential is the best way to properly delegate in an office. There are obviously significant limitations as they relate to a medical practice when treating patients, however, there are office tasks that can be transferred to other members of the team.
Bottom-line changes
We have provided strategies to prevent burnout that do not impact the bottom line. There are other ways to prevent burnout, but you will need to be open to reducing profits. For many physicians, making a little less but being able to go on vacation, or being able to take a day off to go to the zoo with their family, outweighs the risk of burnout. Other physicians choose to join a health care group instead of working as a sole provider to eliminate the administrative tasks required in running a business, and it also allows for additional resources from the group. Others simply downsize their practice or choose not to expand by taking in new physicians or new patients. At the end of the day, these strategies will impact the money made, however, it can help achieve more work-life balance which could prevent burnout.
Originally published 29 June, 2020
The content of this article is intended to provide a general guide to the subject matter. Specialist advice should be sought about your specific circumstances.
