Thursday, June 30th, 2016
Stephan: I have
written about the issue of physician burnout and their being turned into clerks over and over. This article discusses one aspect of the issue but, as you read it, bear in mind this is just one facet of the failure of the illness profit system. You could do another article on the physician shortage, nurse shortage, hospital bed shortage, or the drug shortages. Or drug prices. You really can't understand how bad American healthcare is until you look at the social outcome data of other developed nations and compare it to that of the U.S.
Except for a few small very profitable segments, breast cancer research and treatment, our healthcare is second tier at best. And it is so unbelievably expensive. The only candidate that really addressed healthcare was Bernie Sanders, and I believe he has made a major miscalculation and severely diluted his ability to influence events.
As a people we just can't seem to muster the political will to choose wellness.
Credit: hellostockphoto.com
Of all professionals in the U.S., doctors experience some of the highest rates of burnout: the feeling of being so emotionally exhausted from work that you start to feel indifferent about those you’re serving. More than half of doctors feel this way, recent research shows.
If that sounds like a bad thing for people whose job it is to heal others, it is. (Check out TIME’s in-depth investigation into doctor stress for more.) Studies have linked burnout to a rise in unprofessional behavior, a drop in patient satisfaction and a greater chance that a doctor will make a major medical error.
There’s no one cause for doctor
burnout, but a new
study published in
Mayo Clinic Proceedings has found a major one: the increasingly electronic nature of medicine. The digital parts of doctoring, like maintaining electronic health records, were linked to physician burnout.
Like many of us, doctors are spending more and more time in front of their screens. Health records are now maintained electronically and doctors submit medication orders […]
