'Burnout among medical students isn’t just an individual problem; it’s systemic.'
I was just at the AAMC [Association of American Medical Colleges] meeting this past week and Darrel Kirch, the president and CEO of the AAMC, was giving his final address. He actually talked about one of the crises in medicine, and that is burnout, depression and suicide among physicians at all levels—from student, to resident, to attending.
Dr. Tutty and Dr. Buckley both talked about the high risk of depression, burnout and poor work-life balance. All ages, stages—challenges are not unique. Nurses and other health care professionals also have significant issues around this.What I find interesting is that most medical students report to medical school with high quality-of-life scales, lower depression symptoms, those type of things. I remember the altruistic medical student that I was in the first three months.
What are the stressors for medical students? Well, getting into medical school. The imposter syndrome. The feeling of: “My God, the admissions committee must have made a mistake. What am I doing here?”I mean, it's all about for the first time in your life you're not in the top 10% of your class. You might actually be in the bottom half of your class. Can you imagine that? Keeping up, test anxiety, having the right stuff, do I belong here, stigma and reluctance to ask for help.
Now, the industry is realizing that physicians that are not happy—that are burned out—they actually produce less, they make more errors, their satisfaction scores, patient reviews and all that type of thing. It's like, “Whoa, hey, we've got to score high on our scores. Maybe we ought to actually do something about it.”Where physician burnout starts—and how to help stop itWell, this is what happened to us.
Went to his church that weekend where again his churchmates—it was a young church—his churchmates were all talking about he was the one that was always checking in with you. He was always the one that was concerned about you. Apparently, he couldn't do that for himself, and so obviously, it hit us like a ton of bricks. We just couldn't believe that this had happened to us. I'd always bragged about how we have happy medical students. We have a happy medical school.
We've got a wellness website on our webpage, has resources on the campus, resources around the state, free tools, community programs and a lot of things on our medical library webpage for these types of things too. And so again, it's one of these things where you're building the culture of people expecting that this is normal. “Hey, Joe, it looks like you're not doing really well today. What's going on?”Strengthen the social networks and the time for personal renewal. This is what we're up against folks: therecently ran a piece about how doctors have a responsibility to be at their best. Hippocrates and purity and holiness.
The ACGME, the LCME [Liaison Committee on Medical Education] are both looking at these issues, as I mentioned. And, again, the licensure board. We’ve got to figure out the right questions to ask. ... When I go visit my grandsons in North Carolina, part of their prayer before they go to bed is that we go around the room and do the thankfuls. So Pop-Pop and Mom-Mom have to do their thankfuls along with Ethan and Jacob and their parents, and how do we do that? How do we reflect on that day?
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