Burn out, fatigue, and thoughts of suicide are major problems in the medical profession that are not… [+] being addressed. (Photo: Shutterstock)
This should be a no-brainer: you don't want your doctor to feel burnt out, fatigued, or depressed. Otherwise, he or she is more likely to make mistakes, as a study just published in the Mayo Clinic Proceedings found. What is also a no-brainer, meaning that no brains are being used, is why our health care system, including the medical profession, and society are not doing much more about this growing problem. After all, wouldn't you be alarmed if the person who is flying your airplane or handling a large amount of uranium started muttering about being just too tired to function or wanting to end it all?
The recently published study involved surveying physicians from August 28, 2014, to October 6, 2014, about burnout, fatigue, suicidal ideation, the safety of their work units, and recent medical errors. A team from Stanford University (Daniel S. Tawfik, MD, MS, Daniel S. Tawfik, Jochen Profit, MD, MPH, PhD, and Tait D. Shanafelt, MD), the American Medical Association (Christine A. Sinsky, MD, and Liselotte N. Dyrbye, MD), and the Mayo Clinic (Timothy I. Morgenthaler, MD, Daniel V. Satele, MS, , MHPE, Michael A. Tutty, PhD, and Colin P. West, MD) conducted the study.
The results were depressing. Of the 6586 physicians who responded and provided enough information, a majority (3574 or 54.3%) reported burnout symptoms, nearly a third (2163 or 32.8%) reported excessive fatigue, and several hundred (427 or 6.5%) reported thoughts of suicide recently. This was not good for potential patients, like you, as 691 (10.5%) reported a major medical error in the prior 3 months. Those who reported errors were significantly more likely to have symptoms of burnout (77.6% vs 51.5%), fatigue (46.6% vs 31.2%), and recent thoughts of suicide (12.7% vs 5.8%). Combining all of these, physicians reporting making errors were over twice as likely to have reported burnout and 38% more likely to have reported excessive fatigue.
Sure the study had limitations. It relied on physicians reporting about themselves without verifying information and surveyed only a sample of physicians and not all physicians. But quibbling about the limitations of this study would be like arguing with the deck chairs on the Titanic and missing the bigger picture.
The findings make sense. For nearly every job, performance depends on health, unless your job is to get sick. In fact, the study probably underestimates the number of medical errors and the feelings of fatigue and burnout. After all, how many people are willing to admit, “I screwed up really badly,” especially when a lawsuit may be a sneeze in the wrong direction away. Moreover, many physicians can be remarkably self-unaware, working themselves into the ground before saying, “a little help here please.”
Moreover, since the 1990's, there's been news about increasing physician dissatisfaction, burnout,
