A little over two years ago, my elderly mother was admitted to the hospital. Almost 90, she’d been short of breath for days — uncomfortable, perspiring, unable to sleep properly.
Blood tests, a chest X-ray, and an echocardiogram followed, whereupon her doctor pronounced: “You have congestive heart failure, Mrs. Les.”
I arrived on the scene the next morning to find her lying in bed, iPad open to Dr. Google, earnestly exploring the …
The U.S. government took an important step forward to help address the high incidence of health care professionals’ burnout, depression, and suicides. On March 18, 2022, President Biden signed the Dr. Lorna Breen Health Care Provider Protection Act into law. The law outlines several requirements for the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). Key among them are to:
“It turns out that living beings are less like bags of sloshing water, as I imagined in grade school, and more like a stew. While water makes up most of it, water alone is thin and empty of the organic molecules from which organisms are built—the stew thickeners. Water …
These last two years have been extremely challenging for most health care professionals. Watching society challenge essential health and science principles that we have known to be fact has been difficult to bear. Being villainized, health care workers went from being hailed “health care heroes” to being the target of hate, violence, and disregard.
These past few years have been a year of reckoning in many ways. The COVID-19 pandemic has …
There is no denying that we live and work in some extraordinarily trying times. Cast your eyes in the direction of any streaming news source, and another breaking story that describes the catastrophic dumpster fire of the current state of the U.S. health care industry will jump out at you.
The weight of this downward spiral, coupled with staggering workloads, makes it almost impossible for those struggling in the front lines …
In the coming months, no one can predict with certainty what will happen with the war in Ukraine. But there’s one thing we do know for sure. The United States will soon reach an unthinkable milestone: One million Americans will have died of COVID-19. Over the last month, while many people were celebrating the rollback of mask mandates and other pandemic restrictions, over 1,000 Americans continued to quietly succumb to …
“Unconscious bias in health care describes associations or attitudes that reflexively alter our perceptions, thereby unintentionally affecting behavior, interactions, and decision-making. Health care organizations need to be actively discussing this subject at the highest level to find gaps and learn where to dedicate resources for improvement, even if it …
It’s been a year since I retired from almost 40 years as a pediatrician (most of that time as a pediatric hospitalist). What have I learned? What surprised me?
1. I have finally caught up on my sleep. I have been convinced that I still had a cumulative sleep deficit dating back to med school. After one solid year of sleeping 8-9 hours a night and waking up without an alarm …
Pneumonia is the deadliest of all hospital-acquired infections in the United States, costs 3 billion dollars per year and is the leading cause of new antibiotic initiation in hospitals. Hospital-acquired pneumonia is classified as either ventilator-associated pneumonia (VAP) or non-ventilator hospital-acquired pneumonia (NVHAP). For the past 15 years, VAP has dominated our attention, resulting in the wide implementation of evidence-based prevention strategies that have …
I gasped at the guilty verdict that halted my indifferent scroll through the newsfeed.
In the course of her duties, a nurse who had accidentally administered the wrong drug, self-reported her mistake, and remorsefully admitted her error to a body of her peers was turned into a criminal.
If that standard was applied across the board to medical mishaps, health care as we know it would not exist. We will all be …
“We need to address the underlying preventable factors that cause more Black Americans to die of heart attacks and strokes and suffer from high blood pressure and diabetes complications than white Americans instead of focusing on non-existent biological differences. I would like to see the scientific disciplines unite to …
Recently, colleagues asked me how I solve burnout with communication. From the tone of their voice, they thought I was in over my head, and this was never going to work. I thought, wow, this is a great opportunity for me to share.
I came into the field of burnout through bullying. I’ve been the victim, and I’ve been the bystander-more times than I can count. I’ve been a locums physician …
The Great Resignation. I doubt there is a medical practice out there that has not been affected by it. And experts predict we are just at the beginning. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics’ early data from 2022 shows that health care is among the top three industries increasing in monthly “quit rate,” second only to accommodation and food services. 2.6 million health care workers quit their jobs from May …
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For practicing physicians, inclusivity proves critical.
Not because of HR mandates. Not because it’s a good thing to do.
Inclusivity improves your patients’ care. It enables you to be a better doctor.
Rising complexity, rapid change, and treating far-flung patients mean physicians need information from all angles of care.
Physicians need to know that everyone participating in your patients’ care can tell you vital information. They must feel safe and comfortable communicating with you …
“There is something about physically putting pen to paper, that connection between your mind and your body that is just very health-inducing. And it takes time. And often we do not dedicate the time to taking care of ourselves and something as simple as writing in a journal, writing these, …
As an off-cycle medical student with an extended break between the completion of my M4 rotations and the conferment of my MD, I took a job as a medical scribe to keep myself active in the clinical setting (and, it must be said, provide myself with much-needed income).
I was atypical among most medical scribes, who are generally college students/graduates looking to obtain experience before applying to postgraduate medical programs, so …
Physician burnout continues to increase as we enter into year three of the COVID-19 pandemic. In August 2021, the Physicians Foundation reported data from a survey of 2,504 physicians conducted from May 26-June 9, 2021. In this survey, 61 percent of physicians reported experiencing burnout, an increase from 40 percent reported in the 2018 data. This burnout is often seen in those who, during their midlife, may feel what Brene …
Life continues in medical school and residency. Engagements, marriages, and divorces. Becoming a parent to a child. Having a dog or cat. Love and loss. Life and death. Then there is the uniqueness and privilege of being in medical training combined with great responsibilities and pressures that set the stage for some of the highest of highs and lowest of lows.
Prior to beginning medical school, I was told by a …
“Two issues drive teen substance use: drug availability and perception of risk.
Availability: Today’s teens know that obtaining substances is far too easy. For example, 70 percent of high school seniors say marijuana is either “fairly easy” or “very easy” to obtain. Seventy-seven percent say getting their hands on alcohol is …
So many mixed emotions as I scrolled the multiple acknowledgments on social media this recent Doctors’ Day. Although it is nice to be recognized, are we just supposed to forget the recent hostility and disrespect? Can we ever really thank those on the frontlines who risked their lives during the pandemic? The recognition comes too late for the many doctors and trainees who did not survive. How do we honor …
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