of the site
How ER doctors can combat burnout
The stresses and joys of being an ER doctor page is a good preface to this one. I recommend reading it before you continue.
Working as an ER doctor can be both unusually stressful and unusually rewarding. Fortunately, it is possible to minimize some of those stresses so that you can maximize your career enjoyment. I plan to provide those tips as soon as possible (see * below), because there is definitely a need for them. The sages who teach people to become doctors usually do a good job of training them in the technical aspects of medicine, but those professors and attending physicians rarely utter a peep about some of the most common problems that doctors face. Instead, they figuratively cast fledgling doctors into a minefield and expect them to devise their own countermeasures AFTER they've already stepped on a landmine. Wouldn't it make more sense to broach these problems in advance and advise young doctors on how to avoid them?
* So when will I publish those tips? As soon as I can afford to devote more time to this endeavor. It's now 3:38 PM, and I haven't sold one book today, but four people did click one of the Google ads on my various web sites. From that, I made a grand total of $2.22. Not bad, perhaps, but my book and web publishing expenses are at least $30 per day.
For example, as an ER doctor, you will (as I mentioned here) have some foxy women wrap their arms around you and not want to let go, but you'll also have other patients who want to rip your spleen out. Not all of those angry folks are bad people; many are just frustrated by waiting for hours. I frequently encountered this problem the first hour of busy shifts when I would enter a room and be greeted by a barrage of complaints about how long they waited to be seen.
Even in the best cases, ER patients are often wary of doctors they don't know. You could do what most doctors do, which is to introduce yourself and start asking questions, or you could do what I eventually learned to do, which was to discover how to rapidly (in seconds) make people like you and establish a bond that dissipates their anger and fosters a better ER visit for everyone involved.
Emergency departments treat a wide variety of patients, so you must learn how to harmonize with everyone from CEOs and celebrities to blue-collar workers, alcoholics, drug dealers, criminals, feisty old folks, exhausted parents, defiant teenagers, babies, and everything in between. Medical schools often now provide practical instruction in how to interact with patients, but from what I've seen, such tutelage is woefully incomplete. Patients will perceive you as a better robot, but a robot nonetheless. Their New Age techniques are a step in the right direction, but they only scratch the surface in terms of teaching you the art of medicine.
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Keep that phrase in mind: "the art of medicine." If you attend medical school, you will hear it repeatedly. Medical school professors love to talk about it, but few of them ever master the most vital aspect of this art: learning how to create a doctor-patient relationship that enables you to deliver the best possible care. Less than five minutes after I met some patients, they said they'd told me things they had never mentioned to their own spouse or the guy who'd been their family doctor for decades. Med school profs universally acknowledge the importance of a thorough medical history, but they never give you the tools to help you root out details that may be crucially important. Patient interaction practicums in medical school are typically infrequent, short, and focus on perfectly reasonable, perfectly cooperative, middle aged, middle class intelligent folks. Not cranky kids, drunks in a vile mood, or savvy criminals looking to sleep in a hospital, not in a jail.
Once you begin working as an ER doctor, most of you will work for ER directors and ER corporations that could fill in this educational gap, but most of them don't know how to do this. In addition to helping patients receive better care, my techniques would improve staff morale, which is something for which there is frequently a pressing need. The burnout rate in emergency medicine is alarmingly high. In response, those ER directors and ER corporations typically do . . . nothing.
