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On the positive side, there’s tremendous opportunity for improvement. What can we do? Raise awareness The first step is to raise levels of awareness of how prevalent and serious an issue this is. Organizations need to recognize the negative impact of stress and burnout on physicians and provide appropriate programs and support to enhance physical and mental well being to restore satisfaction, energy and performance. Physicians need to recognize that they are working under increasing amounts of stress, acknowledge it and take steps to mitigate its effect. So where do you begin? There are many deep-seated factors, including age, gender, family and life experiences, culture, and ethnicity, that shape a person’s personality, values and behavioral styles. Many of these factors may affect the way an individual reacts to stress and may need to be addressed through appropriate counseling or behavioral modification programs.16 A second contributing factor is the intensity and duress of medical training. Much of the stress and burnout begins here. Many medical schools and training programs are beginning to address this issue through supportive programs or reduced work-hour commitments to encourage and support time for relaxation and recuperation. Now what can we do for the practicing physician? Offer support Looking at the first series of results, one category of stresses includes the external environment. There is probably little that we can do to affect concerns about the overall economy. Issues related to health care reform and CMS policies are left in the hands of governmental politics, lobbyists and influential medical societies. On the other hand, there is definitely room for opportunity to address work-related stress factors. Providing support services to help with completion and documentation of administrative tasks and adjusting call schedules will allow more free time for physicians to do what they want to do, which is to treat patients. In regard to personal life-related factors, most physicians recognize the need to relax, take time off, spend time with family, exercise and enjoy recreational activities, but don’t make it a priority to set aside enough time for this to occur. Physicians need to be able to say no and organizations need to recognize the importance of assessing staff capacity and not piling on additional tasks and responsibilities without letting some other tasks go. Allowing increased work-life balance will lead to greater job satisfaction, and increased productivity and efficiency, and also ameliorate the tiredness, anxiety and depressionrelated symptoms that can lead to medical errors and other negative outcomes of care. So who is going to take responsibility to make this happen? Ideally it would be the physicians.
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