University of Calgary
Physician heal thyself
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Today is National Health Research Day in Canada.When doctors are sick, tired or burned out, the performance of the health-care system may not be at its best. University of Calgary scientists describe the consequences unwell physicians have for health systems and why those systems should routinely measure physician wellness. Their work is published in the most recent edition of the leading international medical journal, The Lancet.“Traditionally health-care organizations assess their performance using patient-based indicators of quality of care, such as post-operative survival rates,” says lead author Jean Wallace, a sociology professor in the Faculty of Social Sciences and a member of the Calgary Institute for Population and Public Health at the Faculty of Medicine. “We are proposing a paradigm shift by introducing physician wellness as a necessary quality indicator of a health-care system.” Wallace, along with co-authors Drs. Jane Lemaire and William Ghali, assessed the work stresses faced by physicians, the barriers to attending to their wellness, the harmful consequences of unwell physicians to physicians themselves, their patients and health-care systems, and made suggestions about how to change things. “Because the practice of medicine is very stressful, the risk of ill health for physicians is very high,” says Lemaire, an internist and clinical professor in the Department of Medicine. “There is ample evidence that excessive work stress and burnout may lead to substance abuse, relationship problems, depression and even death for physicians. Despite these serious consequences, physicians are not always able to tend to many of their wellness needs.” “There is growing evidence that unwell physicians may negatively impact health-care systems in many ways including workplace productivity and efficiency and quality of patient care and patient safety,” says Ghali, also an internist, a professor in the Departments of Medicine and Community Health Science and member of the CIPPH. “We need to develop valid and reliable measures of physician wellness and gather evidence about how best to intervene if suboptimal performance is identified.”
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November 17, 2009