A Message from the President
Rest and Recovery by Clifford Wang, MD
SCCMA President
Greetings and it is an honor to be your 135th president of the Santa Clara County Medical Association (SCCMA). We have a long and distinguished history of pursuing our mission to extend medical knowledge and advance medical science, to elevate the standards of medical practice, to enlighten the public on matters pertaining to public health, to promote the excellence in the provision of quality ethical healthcare, and to promote the betterment of the medical profession. I hope this year we will add to this legacy. As we turn the page on two years of a pandemic and begin a new year, it is useful to take time to acknowledge what we have been through. We are coming out of our fourth surge with Omicron and over 5 million deaths worldwide. We witnessed rapid change in medicine from vaccine development to new medications, fear and uncertainty of each new variant, mixed messages from various sources, loss revenue from declining patient encounters or elective surgeries, and increased video meetings but less direct human connection. As physicians, we stepped up to care for patients in the face of danger but sometimes at the cost of not being available for our families or the worry that we would infect our loved ones. Dr. Gail Wright, a physician wellness leader, posed these questions at a recent wellness session: What would you like to forget about this pandemic, what is something amazing that you would want to tell your grandchildren you witnessed or were a part of with this pandemic, and what is something we
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learned out of all the difficulties that will propel us forward? I encourage you to take time to reflect and answer what this might be for you. We hope that we are moving from a pandemic period to and endemic period with SARS-CoV-2, but I have learned to not underestimate this virus. Burnout
We know that prior to the pandemic, physicians were already experiencing burnout at high levels, but the pandemic propelled us into survival mode to help wherever we could. It gave us the additional purpose, energy, and endurance to keep hospitals and clinics open, to use telemedicine to reach our patients, and to adapt to new guidelines, policies and mandates. However, the hidden toll from this maybe even more burnout as we come out of the pandemic. Dr. Christina Maslach, former professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkley, pioneered research on job burnout. She describes job burnout as an experience of response to chronic job stressors that have not been successfully managed with three components: exhaustion, negativism or cynicism, and professional inefficacy. The six areas that influence these dimensions include workload, control, reward, community, fairness, and values. I like her analogy of these chronic job stressors being like pebbles in your shoe that will not get better unless they are managed. In 2019, the World Health Organization recognized burnout as an occupational phenomenon which can have health implications and the National
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