How to save millions of dollars and make your doctors happy using your supply chain?
Do this, not that when your doctors are walking out the door - Special series for you on Physician Retention, Recruitment and Well-being.
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What’s been discovered within the realm of physician (and other healthcare professionals) wellbeing, is startling, to say the least. The healthcare industry can be highly toxic, resulting in unprecedented levels of depression, suicide, suicidal ideations, physician turnover, presenteeism, and general dissatisfaction with work and life. But the condition that precedes these and is most readily associated with physician wellbeing is burnout. This, above all, is what we must be working against in our field.
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Wealth can be understood comprehensively as finances, money, debt, and the ability to be financially independent. Physicians spend on average ten years longer than the general population in obtaining education and training. Therefore, they have less time than the average worker to save money for retirement.
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Recently on the blog, we’ve been discussing the emerging scientific field of wellbeing. Thus far, we’ve mostly discussed this in general terms -- the two types of wellbeing needed to thrive and the ladder of wellbeing. The research is typically applied in two ways -- to organizations or individuals.
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The field of wellbeing has significantly expanded the study of the spectrum of human experience. Instead of having only two polarizing options—wellbeing and illness—there are intermediate states where neither true wellbeing nor illness are present.
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In recent years, wellbeing has arrived as a science, complete with research and applications. But as a concept, it has existed for millennia. Religious leaders, poets, writers, and (in the last century) secular self-help experts have written about it ad nauseum. It’s no wonder our modern world is fascinated and mesmerized by the concept.
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Back on the blog again with another episode from one of our favorite podcasts! After Harjot spent time on the podcast at the first of this year, Dr. Dike Drummond had to schedule him back to chat again. In episode 17, Harjot and Dike chat about what superpower you need to prevent burnout. You’ll have to watch to find out!
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The verdict is in. The research is clear. Individuals who are actively engaged in their work have higher levels of personal wellbeing and productivity, plus lower levels of burnout.
Physician leaders looking to engage their team should avoid these mistakes and ask the important questions.
In an ideal world, leaders are able to work with their organization to build an effective engagement program. But alas, we are often not in the utopia we dream of.
So we ask: what happens when organizations refuse to create effective engagement programs and invest in their employees?
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This week I’m sharing an episode of one of our favorite podcasts! Recently, I spent some time with Dr. Dike Drummond talking about one of my favorite topics — wellbeing. In our chat, I outline four levels of wellbeing and discuss the growing field of the science of wellbeing. Dr. Drummond is a delight!
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Recently, we’ve discussed the lack of flow in many physician’s daily work life and how that lack of flow, over time, leads to a disengaged and dangerously burnt out team of physicians. We’ve also outlined 5 important mistakes for physician leaders to avoid when putting in place an engagement plan. In addition to avoiding mistakes, every physician leader striving to form an effective, engaged, and highly functioning team, must be asking the following four questions.
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Approximately 29% of healthcare organizations have an engagement program (MGMA 2018), which sounds like good news. The problem is that typically these programs are disjointed and separate from other programs that have direct bearing on physician engagement. For example, hospitals will have a burnout of wellbeing program that is completely separate from an engagement program, which ignores the important truths that, one, burnout is the opposite of engagement and, two, engagement is a fundamental element of wellbeing. Since we know that burnout and engagement are the opposite ends of the same spectrum (Maslach et al, 2014), we must keep in mind both burnout and engagement when designing a program to engage physicians.
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We know that the ability to achieve a flow state regularly in one’s profession is a key indicator of a physician’s ability to engage in their work. It follows that achieving a flow state consistently should be (so often it’s not!) a priority of organizational management and leadership.
Yet, engagement is more than just flow.
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Since we’re already well-versed in why low levels of engagement are a problem, let’s move on to what’s needed to create engagement, i.e. flow.
Engagement at an individual level has been studied for nearly five decades and there is significant research to bolster this claim. Positive psychology has contributed the most to studying the connection between engagement and flow. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi popularized the concept of flow as he researched creativity and productivity and conducted interviews with people who were successful in a wide range of professions.
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But this isn’t just a “doctor problem”, it exists on the leadership side as well. Physician leaders are pressured to put new initiatives in place and check boxes that they’ve provided “programs” (there’s a vague word) for physician engagement. Rarely are they asked to collect and analyze data about how these programs perform or how they impact the team’s quality of life.
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To recap briefly (if you’ve been following the whole time feel free to skip this opening paragraph), we’ve been spending this fall semester bravely wading through the many, varied and interwoven problems in the healthcare industry. More specifically, we’ve been looking at issues related to physician overwhelm and burnout as well as leadership’s responsibilities to work toward a solution.
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While lack of trust in any workplace a serious threat, in the healthcare industry, it’s literally a matter of life or death. Lack of trust comes as the culmination of many of the problems already unpacked and discussed. Because physician training is so far removed from Chief Medical Officer (CMO) or physician leader training (or lack thereof), it’s easy to understand why physicians may be wary of their CMO’s motives.
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Leaders are often saddled with the ultimate responsibility for physician burnout, which is a fair point. However, an untrained leader who is unable to successfully inhabit their own role is not equipped to help others avoid career pitfalls that they themselves have not avoided.
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This week we begin to tackle another sizeable problem in the healthcare field: lack of training. A kingpin of the problems in our field, the lack of adequate training for physician leaders steers the entire industry into a quagmire from which it’s nearly impossible to extract ourselves. The position of physician leader is still relatively new and, thankfully, evolving.
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