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    Burnout in Healthcare: A Guide to Addressing the Epidemic
    Burnout in Healthcare: A Guide to Addressing the Epidemic
    Burnout in Healthcare: A Guide to Addressing the Epidemic
    Ebook106 pages1 hour

    Burnout in Healthcare: A Guide to Addressing the Epidemic

    By Rajeev Kurapati

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    About this ebook

    A must-read for every medical professional, healthcare consumer, and patient advocate.
    Burnout among medical professionals has reached epidemic proportions. Much of this distress can be attributed to the pile-on of duties and responsibilities healthcare workers face, including an increasing workload, complex quality measures, and expanding policy stipulations—on top of providing quality patient care. At the same time, these growing tasks are coupled with staff shortages and waning organizational support.

    It's hardly a surprise that the rates of depression and suicide continue to increase among exhausted medical professionals. Burnout is not only harmful to overworked, unsupported healthcare professionals, it also puts patients at risk.
    In this book, award-winning author and hospital physician Rajeev Kurapati offers a guide to recognizing burnout, as well as providing practical, actionable techniques for developing resilience at both the individual and organizational levels. Based on the latest evidence-based research, these steps will help practitioners regain joy and gain freedom from burnout.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRajeev Kurapati
    Release dateJul 23, 2019
    ISBN9781798497944
    Author

    Rajeev Kurapati

    Dr. Rajeev Kurapati is a Board Certified Family Physician and author, writing about what it means to be human. By uniting the wisdom of spiritual traditions, the theories of science, and the nature of biology, Dr. Kurapati empowers readers to understand the complex workings of our mind and the role this plays in our journey to happiness. He lives in Cincinnati with his wife and son. His latest book, UNBOUND INTELLIGENCE: Discovering the God Within, released in Jan 2014, is available at all major online retailers.

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      Book preview

      Burnout in Healthcare - Rajeev Kurapati

      Introduction

      Patients enter a hospital or clinic for one reason—they’re looking for relief. This might come in the form of a diagnosis, a cure, or support and comfort for an incurable illness. To achieve this, two ingredients are essential: care and connection.

      Imagine a hospital or a doctor’s office where these critical factors are lacking. Healthcare providers might be physically present, but they’re emotionally withdrawn and exhausted. Rather than engaging fully with patients and staff, they go through their days by rote habit, lacking passion and attention to detail. In this scenario, everyone suffers. Right now, this is exactly what’s happening to medical staff in many healthcare organizations.

      If you’ve found your way to this book, you’re already familiar with this phenomenon. Burnout is a serious issue occurring at both an individual and organization level, and it calls for our immediate attention.

      It’s an exciting time to be in the business of healthcare, but for the medical professional—a nurse, doctor, or other care practitioner—it’s becoming more and more stressful to keep up with expectations.

      I’ve been practicing hospital medicine since 2008, and over the last decade I’ve seen many of my talented, high-achieving colleagues become shells of their former selves or exit the profession altogether. The balancing act of staying true to their patients’ best interests and being subservient to rising pressures from regulators, policy makers, and insurance industries is driving practitioners beyond the tipping point—resulting in the breakdown of their resiliency.

      Since the turn of the century, the healthcare profession has undergone dramatic changes, growing more advanced, faster paced, and increasingly complicated. This forward progress has pushed the limits of science to spectacular heights and saved many lives. We’ve bettered the treatment of diseases by standardizing protocols, implementing checklists to prevent medical errors, and improving proper antiseptic techniques. Technology has expanded the scale of medical research and made communication between patients and care providers easier.

      Yet alongside these revolutionary benefits, we’ve also begun to see some undesirable consequences of the digitization of medicine.

      Large-scale implementation of electronic health records, for instance, has made access to health information easier but added more work for already overloaded medical professionals. It’s put the physician, nurse, and social worker into a mode of constant data entry. This combines with other existing pressures—like the urgency to keep costs down and the relentless drive for both patient accessibility and quality of care.

      The result of these mounting expectations—coupled with a lack of proper self-care and meager organizational attention to care providers’ well-being—is burnout.

      Medical staff at all levels report widespread dissatisfaction and work-life imbalance. In turn, this perpetuates a cycle of detrimental outcomes. Staff burnout is associated with lower patient satisfaction and thus poor patient experience, as well as higher costs to health systems. This is then reflected in a shortage of healthcare workers (as practitioners leave the profession early), furthering the strain on those who stay.

      For most healthcare workers, a career in medicine is driven by the desire to help others. Yet more and more physicians and nurses report feeling like the joy of medicine is gone. Unfortunately, many healthcare providers are already burned out before they can put the pieces together.

      With this book, I set out to explore the nature of burnout, its many forms and symptoms, and ultimately its solutions. I spent months talking with physicians, nurses, and other care practitioners around the country (their names have been changed to maintain anonymity), and I drew input from their experiences and feedback. In addition, I dug into research by experts at Mayo Clinic and other organizations about the unique ways healthcare workers experience burnout, as well as how the profession is set up to exacerbate burnout’s causes and symptoms. I spoke with doctors who don’t seem to be impacted by burnout to learn what they’re doing differently. Then I synthesized all of that information here—creating a quick, informative guide addressing burnout for healthcare practitioners.

      Burnout doesn’t have a quick fix or a pill to swallow to ease the symptoms. Instead, it requires conscious choices to change both your physical environment and your inner world to find the freedom you’re looking for.

      In the ensuing chapters, I explain how to recognize burnout and discuss its causes. Then I explore methods for addressing it—both at the organizational and individual levels. This book leads readers through techniques for developing resilience that can help create a stronger sense of satisfaction and fulfillment in the workplace and beyond.

      You may not be in a position to make huge changes in your life or within your healthcare organization. Even so, there’s still plenty for you to gain from this book, including practical, evidence-based strategies to help prevent future burnout, tackle it if you see the symptoms, and restore joy to your practice of caregiving—or even life itself.

      Burnout is the sum total of hundreds and thousands of tiny betrayals of purpose, each one so minute that it hardly attracts notice.

      — RICHARD GUNDERMAN

      CHAPTER 1

      Burnout: A Knotty Process

      Burnout is going to impact

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