I wonder if family physicians are already getting burned out hearing about burnout. Nevertheless, it’s still an important and unresolved issue. As a brief reminder, burnout is associated with poorer patient care, physician retirement, poorer physician health, and productivity. In a related issue, America loses the equivalent of 2 large medical school classes per year to physician suicide.

Along comes a study of primary care physician burnout.  Researchers interviewed 21 physicians and 5 mid-levels and analyzed the data qualitatively. Six themes emerged, 3 external and 3 internal. Participants described heavy workloads, doing less doctor work and more office work = filling out forms and clicking computer screens, and unreasonable expectations placed on them by many other parties (patients, systems, administrators, etc.), authority-responsibility mismatch, and a sense of undervaluation. They reported a sense of professional dissonance, that the systems hold values counter to their own.

The researchers included a long list of proposed solutions. I won’t repeat the fluffy ones here, such as “empowering” lots of people. To me, the list can be boiled down to 3 things: horrible EMRs, horrible documentation rules, and a lack of payment for the complex work we do, both in the visit and outside the visit.

To fix this means that the bureaucrats of many institutions – governments, American Medical Association, insurance companies – would have to admit that they or their predecessors screwed things up. Sorry, but I’m not holding my breath for this to occur.

This entry was posted on February 5, 2020 at 2:47 pm and is filed under Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.