Burnout Returns to Center Stage

A recentMayo Clinic Proceedings guesteditorial, by Yale University physician Kristine Olson, asks the question--to some of us it ' s far from a rhetorical one--whether burnout among her fellow physicians is in fact " A Leading Indicator of Health System Performance? "Seems to me that her gist is: yes, it surely must be just such an indicator. If she ' s right, then our system ' s performance is in a heap of trouble.What is burnout? Our fearless editor, Dr. Poses, has addressed it repeatedly, including a few months agohere in these pages. But burnout is actually hard to delineate and hard to quantify. People quitting? People getting a lot less efficient once they see they ' re on the hamster-wheel? Getting lousy performance ratings because they ' re forced to hang in? (Wishing they had another option?) Leaving front line medicine to go to industry? Leaving to clip coupons and bicycle in Provence?Well, to quote Justice Potter Steward in his inimitable pronouncement for his short concurrence in the 1964 SCOTUS obscenity proceedings, " I know it when I see it. "I know burnout when I see it. So do you. You want a physician who loves her job enough to get good at it, because lives depend on that. How ' s that going for you?I ' ve watched my best and brightest colleagues--or those who could find a nonclinical job or afford to retire--leave in droves. Now the waves of new investigations of burnout are coming at us thick and fast. What ' s striking about the latest spate of writi...
Source: Health Care Renewal - Category: Health Management Source Type: blogs