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STRESSED OUT

What makes
doctors great
also drives burnout:
A double-edged sword

By Troy Parks, Staff Writer for the American Medical Association

A physician burnout expert from the Mayo Clinic explained ear- “On a societal level folks would look at us and think we have a
lier this month at the 2016 AMA Annual Meeting how physicians recipe for great personal and professional satisfaction,” he said. “We
in the current health care system often have an intrinsic risk of engage in work that society values and thinks is meaningful work.
burnout. Learn about the role that the “physician personality” can And yet our own literature has been telling a different story about
play in burnout and ways Mayo has found to help address burnout the experience of being a physician.”
as a system-wide issue.
A recent study published in Mayo Clinic Proceedings took a look
What’s happening to physicians? at how physician burnout compares to the general population and
“If I told you we had a system issue that affected quality of care, found that physicians displayed almost double the rate of emotional
exhaustion as the general working population and reported lower
limited access to care, and eroded patient satisfaction, that affected satisfaction with work-life balance (36.0 percent for physicians, ver-
up to half of patient encounters,” said Tait Shanafelt, MD, a hema- sus 61.3 percent of the general working population).
tologist and physician burnout researcher at the Mayo Clinic, “you
would immediately assign a team of systems engineers, physicians, Dr. Shanafelt said that burnout is often the result of three com-
administrators at your center to fix that problem rapidly.” ponents:
• Depersonalization: Treating people as though they’re objects
Tait Shanafelt, MD, hematologist and physician burnout researcher
at the Mayo Clinic rather than human beings
• Emotional exhaustion: Losing enthusiasm for your work
That’s what burnout is, he said. It’s a system issue. “And we have • Low personal accomplishment: Feeling you’re ineffective in your
not mobilized the way we would to address other factors affecting
quality access and patient satisfaction,” Dr. Shanafelt said. work, whether or not that is an accurate perception

18 San Antonio Medicine • April 2017