Prescription for Healing: The Epidemic of Physician Burnout

·      The emergence of physician burnout

·      COVID-19 and it’s contributing factors to physician burnout

·      The physical and mental health impacts on doctors

·      Next steps

 

Physicians in the United States have been feeling burnt out increasingly over the past few years. According to Mayo Clinic, 63% of physicians reported feeling at least one of the symptoms of burnout since 2022. That is a 44% jump since the year 2017. A majority of the physicians claim that they have no work-life balance which has gotten worse over the past few years. 

The pandemic undoubtedly played a part in exacerbating the burnout that the physicians were facing but it is not the sole reason for it. It was definitely a contributing factor to the overtaxed ICUs and the lack of PPE and the high mortality rates of patients which wreaked havoc on the physician's mental health. But there were already underlying issues in the US healthcare system that needed to be addressed and COVID-19 just added fuel to the fire in the broken system that is the US healthcare. 

Over the past few years, a lot of family-owned practices have merged into large multispecialty groups and are now often owned by hospitals and other big corporations, which makes doctors the employees or line workers for these large corporations whose only goal is profit. This leads to the physicians/line workers often being grilled endlessly on their performance metrics, eventually making them feel unseen, and unheard and leaving them with no agency to accomplish anything. This bureaucracy of the corporate-owned hospitals makes physicians feel invisible and just another replaceable employee in their line of duty, leading to them feeling burnt out with high levels of job dissatisfaction. Moreover, nowadays instead of spending their time and energy on interacting with the patients, physicians now spend half as much time on their desk work entering information into EHRs increasing the feelings of isolation and loneliness, therefore making the work dull. A doctor who loves interacting with patients may stop looking forward to visiting them if it is accompanied by large amounts of paperwork later. 

 To add to the burnout, Covid-19 was quite traumatic to the health workforce and their families. From the lack of PPE to the risk of the physicians contracting the virus and passing it on to their families to working long hours for many months treating patients with high mortality rates; the pandemic took a huge toll on the physician’s mental and emotional health. Many doctors have reported feeling utter emotional exhaustion, depersonalization from work, a lack of sense of personal accomplishment, and overall high levels of job dissatisfaction. 

By the end of 2021, the physician burnout rate was recorded to be at an unprecedented high which would result in one in five physicians intending to leave their current practice within the next two years. Dr. Jack Resneck Jr, the president of AMA stated, "While the worst days of the COVID-19 pandemic are hopefully behind us, there is an urgent need to attend to physicians who put everything into our nation’s response to COVID-19, too often at the expense of their own wellbeing.”

Resneck stated that the following goals would be addressed to cater to the needs of doctors as outlined in the AMA Recovery Plan for American Physicians:

·       Supporting telehealth.

·       Reforming Medicare payment.

·       Stopping scope creep.

·       Fixing prior authorization burdens.

·       Reducing physician burnout. 

It is crucial that steps be taken to address the burnout that the physicians are facing as the physician shortages were already high before COVID and have almost become a health emergency post-pandemic. It is important to have a recovery plan since it will become increasingly challenging to bring in a talented workforce in the medical field and fill these shortages over time. Resneck stated that supporting physicians and prioritizing their well-being is essential to national goals and the AMA plans to work on addressing the dysfunction in the healthcare system by removing obstacles and burdens that interfere with patient care.