This Clinician's View is written by Omayra Mansfield, MD, Advent Health Apopka Chief Medical Officer. Nearly half of physicians in the U. S.
are feeling burned out according to national surveys, and those who specialize in emergency medicine report the highest burnout rates. Additionally, physicians typically have higher suicide rates than the general population with psychiatrists and anesthesiologists at highest risk. To someone charged with leading and supporting physicians, these statistics are disheartening but not surprising to me.
Because I am a trained emergency medicine physician married to an anesthesiologist and raising two young children together, these figures hit especially close to home. To quote the most recent Medscape Physician Burnout & Depression Report released earlier this year, “We have much work to do.” Battling Physician Burnout While the concept of burnout is not new, it grew significantly during the COVID-19 pandemic and remains high today.
It has been defined as long-term, unresolved, job-related stress leading to exhaustion, cynicism, depersonalization and decline in a sense of personal accomplishment. Digging deeper into the numbers of the 2024 Medscape survey, which the compiled the input of over 9,000 U. S.
physicians across 29 specialty areas:Eighty-three percent of doctors surveyed cited professional stress as the primary contributor to their burnout and/or depression. The number of work-related bureaucratic tasks was cited as the primary reason for burnout (62%). Spending too many hours at work (41%) and lack of respect from administrators, employers and coworkers (40%) also were contributing factors.
I often explain physician burnout as death by 1,000 cuts. It typically isn’t one incident but an accumulation of stressors or injuries over time. Unfortunately, health care organizations and leaders have too often missed the mark and framed the solution as a need for physicians to simply “build more resilience.”
However, the challenges are complex, and therefore the answers are multifaceted. They include creating a more collaborative culture, celebrating personal and professional growth, building trust and community, supporting physician well-being and implementing strategies to ease physician workload. Moving Beyond Resilience to Embrace Collaborative Solutions Resilience is defined as the capacity to withstand or recover quickly from difficulties, something physicians do every day in their clinical practice settings.
Our efforts to address physician burnout must be about so much more than that. To better illustrate this, consider the analogy where we describe and characterize strong, durable bones as resilient. Like our bones, even the healthiest and most mentally strong physician is susceptible to a stress fracture due to repetitive force and overuse.