BE … Aware

I invite advocates, caregivers, influencers,  journalists, politicians, and podcasters and  to reflect on our mental health and wellness during this global pandemic.  Is this compassionate stance evident in your daily practice within your peer group, organizational culture and local community?

Discussions surrounding burnout and compassion fatigue are not new but remain timely and appropriate. As we observe many peers abandoning their chosen careers, we cannot ignore the cry for organizational and systems change.

We must acknowledge that burnout exists, impacts our professional practice, and is detrimental to our personal wellness as care providers within current systems. Christina Maslach (UC Berkeley) designed the Maslach Burnout Inventory, which illuminates several key issues and the underlying pathophysiology of burnout:

A. Social conflicts within our workplaces

B. Overwhelming demands

C. Lack of resources (human, physical, $, technical, intellectual)

D. Exhaustion

E. Depersonalization and cynicism

F. Inefficacy in practice

The symptoms of burnout have unfortunately become the norm within our healthcare operating systems. Burnout is a multi-faceted condition that is repeatedly ignored. Burnout may present as increased stress or career dissatisfaction. If left unchecked, burnout leads to an increased opportunity for errors and suboptimal patient care and family experience (MEMO Study).

In today’s pandemic world, communities show their support for caring professions in many ways.  We hear a symphony of banging pots, windows displaying glowing hearts, and trees wrapped in blue ribbons to show their support for their fading caring professions. I wonder is this not a broader community cry for help?

As care providers and local citizens, we must embrace crucial conversations to speak truth to the white elephants within the healthcare sector. We must continue to explore why burnout persists. Burnout, stress and compassion fatigue take a toll, in both our work and home lives.

Healthcare reform implores us to re-examine safety, quality economics, IT/EHR and communication strategies to optimize our practice settings. How we shift from a provider-centric built environment to an adaptive hub of services that authentically embrace a real-time patient-family partnership is paramount. Service users and their families seek standardized systems that measure access, timeliness, evidence-based practice, favourable outcomes and quality of life.

The COVID 19 pandemic flames the simmering discontent, and communities call loudly for change. We must acknowledge that we have abandoned our trusted caring professions. They are the last humans standing on the edge of a care delivery systems collapse.

Politicians and decision-makers gaze down safely from their shelter in the storm, exempt from the consequences and lived reality of their policy decision making outcomes. For the common folk, like you and I, the wait-listed lived experience, with our new norm commonly cited as 1-2 years to access specialty assessment, is not serving the health of our families well.

Our friends/colleagues and family surviving throughout this ‘COVID pause’ and simultaneously being denied access to mental health services and timely healthcare is not safe, just, deserved or sustainable.

How best to support our front-line providers during their time of need?

While employed with an operational systems failure, burnout prevention does require transformational change on so many levels. The first step to wellness and burnout prevention resides at the individual and team level to ensure we have the resources to tackle subsequent significant systems changes:

A. Stress Reduction- Behaviour and lifestyle changes to ensure health eating, physical activity and healthy lifestyle

B. Mindfulness – Mindfulness-Based-Stress Reduction

C. Peer Support and a well designed workplace wellness hybrid models

D. Professional Assistance to acknowledge the human factors in caregiving within a global pandemic

We cannot continue to blame caring professions for not ‘toughing it out’ or ‘sucking it up.’ This fundamental flaw in the foundation of healthcare delivery needs repair. The fault line lies in the context of human factors, the built environment and resource allocation. I encourage you to examine the human factors and explore the consequences of avoidance.

Enable your teams to analyze the design of the built environment and operations that perpetuate burnout of our most caring peers. I encourage you to cultivate compassionate conversations for change. Our livelihood and that of our colleagues and communities depend on it.

Yours in wellness,

Maria

Shannon, D. W. (2014). An Invisible Barrier to Compassionate Care: The Implications of Physician Burnout and Family Experience. Shannon Healthcare Communications Inc. The Beryl Institute.

https://theberylinstitute.org