Physician Burnout Quotes

Much of clinician burnout is due to spending time writing notes, placing orders, generating referrals, writing prior authorization letters, and creating patient communication. In other words, burnout is caused by physicians having to generate output! With the emergence of large language models that are used to train generative AI solutions, these use cases will be at the frontier of AI’s applications in healthcare.

They remained imprisoned in the CICU, kept alive in physicality by mechanical devices and medicinal support, inexorably suffering. I revered their resiliency, though I struggled to understand whether they were truly resilient or if this was a descriptive term I used to assure myself that what we were doing was just. Could they merely represent physical beings at this point, molecular derivatives of carbon and water, void of souls that had moved on months prior once the universe had delivered their inevitable fate, simply kept alive by us physicians, who ourselves clutched desperately to the most favored of our prehistoric binary measures of success: life?

Burnout also leads to a large swath of physicians who aren't as empathetic toward their patients as they could be.

Burnout is a war that must be won on two fronts.

highly motivated and mission-driven professionals are working in toxic work environments in which they are unable to succeed.

The professional ideal of “detached concern” among medical practitioners represents this blend of closeness and distance.1 Many physicians believe it is a prerequisite for effective patient care. But, much like oil and water, detachment and concern do not mix easily.

How the sadness is handled by the physician has a powerful impact on the medical care received by the patients. If the grief is relentlessly suppressed--as in Eva's experience during residency--the result can be a numb physician who is unable to invest in a new patient. This lack of investment can lead to rote medical care--impersonal at best, shoddy at worst. At the other end of the spectrum is the doctor who is inundated with grief and can't function because of the overwhelming sorrow. Burnout is significant in both these cases, and that erodes the quality of medical care.

With mindfulness, we are training ourselves to become the master of our minds, a skill that is especially important for physicians.

A fascinating part of physician burnout is that without realizing it we can find ourselves stuck in a Groundhog Day–like pattern.

Nearly every doctor I worked with dreamed as a child about curing disease and worked like crazy to become a doctor. They studied tirelessly to learn science, entered medical school with idealistic visions, and became the pride of their family. They entered residency with hundreds of thousands of dollars of student loan debt and initially saw the chronic sleep deprivation and verbal abuse by their superiors as integral parts of the experience—because “great achievement is born of great sacrifice.” But almost universally among doctors I have met, this idealism eventually turns to cynicism. My colleagues in residency talked often about questioning their sanity, of wondering whether this was all worth it. I spoke with successful surgeons who’d drafted their resignation letters dozens of times. Another had a recurring daydream of leaving everything behind and becoming a baker. Many of my supervising physicians were desperate to spend more time with their children. I witnessed more than one tearful breakdown in the operating room when surgical cases were delayed and led to yet another missed bedtime for their kids. Several had dealt with suicidal depression. I understood why doctors had the highest burnout and suicide rate of any profession. Inevitably, these conversations led to an insight that I believe is whispered by doctors in every hospital in America: they feel trapped inside a broken system.

The combination of these Names in repetition helps to protect you from your own spiritual greed or desire, and to protect you from going too high too fast when you are not prepared. Repetition of Ya Khafid may also be an antidote for spiritual burnout, especially when a person feels that spiritual practices are not working to change their condition.

strong desire to continue being caregivers and their simultaneous desperation to leave.