What Are You Reading?
Battling Workplace Burnout. Thom Mayer, MD. Barrett-Kohler Publishers, 323 pages.
Subtitle: Learning to Love the Job You Have, While Creating the Job You Love
Rest. Recover. Work. is Dr. Thom Mayer’ s mantra for professionals seeking to acquire tools to channel workplace burnout into enhanced passion for their chosen profession. His target audience is frontline healthcare workers who are faced with an amazing amount of stress and pressure by the variety of factors involved in yielding positive outcomes in patient care.
Dr. Mayer makes the analogy that burnout out is literally heat that begins at the body’ s core and burns outward. His solution is to use the heat from the burnout to drive and sustain performance. Given his background and propensity for allusions common to sport, Dr. Mayer presents as a jock doc who at an earlier time in his career was a football linebacker. Dr. Mayer espouses the cando mentality of a pro athlete who knows stress in a very personal way. As medical director of the NFL Players Association, he sees instances where combative stress leads to permanent disability and death.
Football competition has yielded a wide variety of lifealtering maladies. Most recently, chronic traumatic encephalopathy( CTE) is the term used to describe brain degeneration likely caused by repeated head trauma. Players, including members of the pro football Hall of Fame, have suffered cerebral injuries that range from a player“ having his bell rung”, suffering a concussion, to life threatening outcomes with major stars having succumbed, some by suicide.
Dr. Mayer’ s book is voluminous with many affirmations of how burnout can be redirected for benefits to the individual practitioner, the healthcare team, and to the patient. Burnout is not a recent phenomenon as he provides historic references to stressors that affect us all. Whole chapters are devoted to describing burnout combating tools voiced with a sense of urgency and tons of optimism.
Accountability is a key factor, he notes. Every healthcare team member should see themselves as a leader and take responsibility for the areas where they can make the contribution necessary for success as a whole. Citing various sources, he notes that as many as 60 % of physicians and 50 % of nurses report long term burnout.
This realization, needless to say, results in high employee turnover, risks to patient safety, and reduced performance quality and productivity. COVID-19 has only exacerbated the problem. His conclusion:“ The way we’ re working isn’ t working.”
Burnout creates three cardinal symptoms: emotional exhaustion, cynicism, and loss of a sense of meaning at work. Three additional highlights of why this analysis is valuable in evaluating the dichotomy between high performance and burnout include:
• Every healthcare team member should be a leader.
• Every healthcare team member is a performance athlete engaged in the cycle of performance, training, and recovery.
• The work begins from within. Start with you.
Dr. Mayer’ s observation is that given the high degree of stress, it’ s not so surprising about the frequency of how often things go wrong. What is surprising is how often we get things right. Further, given the amount of
CDU College of Medicine | PG. 41