Battling Burnout And Restoring Resilience

BATTLING BURNOUT AND RESTORING RESILIENCY

Thom Mayer, MD

Imagine that you have an illness or injury in your family-how comfortable would you be in entrusting their care to a team of people-half of whom are burned out. How comfortable would you be in doing that? Unfortunately, that unsettling prospect is today’s sad reality, as multiple studies have shown. And while the pandemic did not help the situation, it did not cause our pandemic of burnout, which varies by practice site and specialty, but to which none of us are immune. But I submit that “burnout” and “resiliency” are still terms which are more often used than they are clearly understood and articulated. Let’s fix that through the work of the Santa Clara Medical Society!

First, “definitions must drive solutions,” by which I mean simply that defining an entity-particularly a disruptive entity like burnout-should by the very nature of the process make solutions evident to those seeking to make things better, whether a patient or those who care for the patient-all of you and all of your patients. So, here’s my definition, which I think drives pragmatic solutions:

Burnout is simply a ratio of 2 things: Job Stressors/ Adaptive Capacity (Figure 1):

Whenever job stressors rise or adaptive capacity/resiliency declines (or doesn’t rise fast enough to counteract the rise in stressors), the results are the 3 cardinal burnout symptoms of:

• Emotional Exhaustion • Cynicism • Loss of a Sense of Meaning at Work

So, armed with this definition, how do we battle burnout and restore resiliency? (Resiliency is simply adaptive capacity or the ability to counteract those stressors.) Simple:

• Reduce Job Stressors • Increase Adaptive Capacity

That’s the leverage in this battle and as Archimedes said, “Give me a lever long enough and I can move the world.”

Figure 1