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A healthy medical field leads to healthy physicians; and healthy physicians to healthy patients.
The medical field is always evolving, sometimes for the better and sometimes for the worse. It is up to the ones who know the system best—the physicians (and future physicians)—to challenge unhealthy practices that don’t ultimately serve the patients the industry exists to protect. Here are a few:
Sizing up performance measurement
In the medical field, performance measurement has become all the rage. While physicians and hospitals used to derive their satisfaction from giving the best possible care to their patients, now they are obsessed with how this care will reflect their rankings, success rates, and accolades. There are even articles on 6 Ways to Get Patients to Rate You an A+.
In addition to giving physicians the wrong motivation, performance measurement also gets in the way of patient care, contributing to burnout rates and administrative stress. Like teenage romance, you spend more time evaluating your relationship with your patients than actually having one. Physicians are also inclined to pay more attention to the performance measurement criteria that is tested at the expense of other equally important aspects of patient care.
Allowed to be sick and tired
Physicians struggle with feelings of guilt when it comes to taking off work for personal reasons, including sick leave and bereavement. They face pressure both from their patients, co-workers, and employers, not wanting to neglect, overburden, or lose out on money, respectively. Several have even worked a shift shortly after losing a loved one, forced to process their feelings in the bathroom between shifts. It’s time for doctors to stop feeling guilty for taking time off.
Though it’s true physicians have a bigger responsibility to others than most, these unrealistic expectations actually do more to hurt the system than to help it. A sick or grieving doctor is simply not mentally or physically capable of giving the type of care necessary. If we want to decrease depression among physicians and increase patient safety, we need more humane policies in place that tell hospitals where to draw the line.
From diagnosis to treatment
As physicians, it is not just our job to diagnose a problem, we must also take the action necessary to treat it. The same principle goes for any issues physicians come across in their career. It’s not enough just to point it out, they must also act.
As Dr. Paul Teirstein says, “You can’t just complain. Physicians are really good about complaining: We complain, see our patients, and then complain in the lunchroom again. I think the surprising thing for a lot of physicians is, if you spend a little more time on these issues, we can make progress. It’s been a real eye-opener.”
Some of you may already be actively involved in certain activist groups on campus, but many of you will find your hot-button issue later in your career. Physicians make great activists because they are even more aware of their ability to make a difference because they experience it tangibly every day on the job.
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The post Challenging Unhealthy Practices in the Medical Field appeared first on Residency Secrets.
