Why “Physician Wellness” Is Such a Struggle

In response to the chronic epidemic of physician burnout, there is a lot of talk about Physician Wellness these days. Hospitals and groups are being encouraged to establish a physician wellness committee and do something, anything, for the doctors.In this article, let me show you:

• Why these committees often sputter and die a quick, silent death
• AND, why the concept of physician wellness is always such a struggle

Here is a true story of what often happens.

A large academic medical center suffered two physician suicides in quick succession. The CEO “volun-told” a member of the medical school faculty to establish a physician wellness committee to address this issue. No funding was provided.

The board managed to scrounge 6 months of a 0.2 FTE in funds from other departments. All the time and all the money was spent researching what other organizations were doing about physician wellness. The project died researching “best practices” without producing a single visible action or effect.

This was one year ago. Nothing more has been done since. This tragic missed opportunity is just waiting for another suicide to drive people into another six month flurry of activity at some point in the near future.

Reality Check
Even though you can see how futile this effort was … this token attempt to address physician wellness is more than most healthcare organizations do for their doctors. In the average organization, the physicians and staff do not appear in the mission statement and there is no attempt to measure or address stress and burnout in the front-line care providers. In this setting, physician burnout remains the elephant in the room that everyone does their best to ignore.

Why is Physician Wellness such a struggle?

“Wellness” is a totally foreign concept in healthcare-it’s a non-starter. 

Think about it. We don’t learn about health and wellness in our training. We never even used the word wellness in medical school and residency–not once. We were too busy learning a physician’s basic trade:  diagnosing and treating disease. Our “healthcare” system is a disease-management system. Doctor’s bandwidth is occupied 110% by rooting out disease and helping our patients prevent and treat it as best we can.

Wellness is a concept that is off the radar for physicians.

If you say “wellness” to a group of doctors, these 3 things will happen.1. Confused stares and silence.

• It often looks like the face a dog makes when it does not know what it is looking at … the head tilt and furrowed brow of complete confusion.

2. A month-long minute-detail debate about the meaning of the word.

• Is wellness more than just the absence of disease?
• Can you have an adequately treated disease and be well?
• If everyone’s definition of wellness is different, how can we create physician wellness in a group of 120 doctors?

3. A small number of the old guard will begin muttering “Physician wellness … bah … that’s just for pansies and women who never learned how to work like we had to when I was a resident.” (This is a direct quote … not my words)

If you have ever tried to establish a physician wellness committee, you have seen all 3 of these reactions … sometimes simultaneously. Each of them destroys enthusiasm and buy-in. Physician wellness is possibly the worst possible term to use for what we are trying to create here.

Let’s do this instead. Instead, let’s let the physicians stay in the disease paradigm and do what they do best-prevent, diagnose, and treat disease.

• The disease is physician burnout
• The risk factor is physician stress
• The task is to minimize the risk
• And prevent, detect, and treat the disease

The Committee is
• The “Physician Burnout Prevention Committee “

Immediately you can begin to have a productive conversation and plan your action steps, no matter how many physicians are in the meeting. You don’t have to research what other people are doing about an exotic concept like “physician wellness.” The research on prevention and treatment of physician burnout is deep and wide. AND remember this important point …

Anything you do to prevent or treat physician burnout automatically increases physician Wellness / Health / Happiness / Fulfillment / Engagement / and Productivity

So let’s stop talking about physician wellness and instead, start our Physician Burnout Prevention Committee. When you frame this avoidable epidemic in this way … you can instantly see at least 117 different ways to get started.Any reduction in physician burnout will also reduce its pervasive negative effects

Here is what physician burnout is invisibly causing in your organization right now. Let’s get started on turning these around.

• Lower patient satisfaction and care quality
• Higher medical error rates and malpractice risk
• Higher levels of physician and staff turnover
• Conflict between administration and physicians and consistent physician resistance to change and innovation

When physicians see your organization surveying them for stress and burnout and actively working to lower their job stress levels … it builds trust and engagement – where a wellness committee would still be debating the meaning of the term or falling into the trap of researching best practices.

So here is my highest recommendation:

Let’s stop trying to get a physician wellness committee off the ground and focus on active physician burnout detection, prevention, and treatment instead. Let the physicians do what they do best … and wellness is absolutely not it.

PLEASE LEAVE A COMMENT:
Does your group have a Physician Wellness Committee and how is that going?

Dike Drummond is a family physician and provides burnout prevention and treatment services for healthcare professionals at his site, The Happy MD.com