As a pediatric neurosurgeon, Dr. Tony Avellino has learned how to function under high levels of stress, but it was a difficult lesson. “To be honest with you, when I was a med student I thought it was normal,” Avellino said of feeling stressed, depressed or burned out. The years of caring for hundreds of critically ill children, not of all whom would have favorable outcomes, took a toll on Avellino’s mental and emotional health, to the point nearly a decade ago when he felt depressed and suicidal. “The things that keep you up at night are not the hundreds of patients that you help,” he said. “It’s the one or two or three every year that you actually make an honest mistake or don’t do very well.” Now, Avellino knows that he wasn’t unique in feeling that way. A study published in 2015 in “Mayo Clinic Proceedings” revealed that more than half of physicians in the United States are experiencing professional burnout, and the numbers are increasing. The study compared physician responses in 2011 and 2014 and found that physicians reported higher levels of burnout and lower levels of satisfaction with their work-life balance during the short time frame. Additional research reveals even more troubling statistics. Male physicians are 1.4 times more likely to commit suicide than the general population, while the risk is even greater among female physicians, at 2.2 times higher. Physicians who took their own lives were also much less likely to have received mental health care than their non-physician counterparts. Avellino and many other physicians and administrators like him have taken up the charge of raising awareness among the medical community as well as putting parameters in place to help combat some of the mental and emotional challenges of practicing medicine. “It’s an epidemic and we need to do something about it to solve it,” Avellino said. Avellino has used his platform as the CEO of the OSF HealthCare Neuroscience Service Line/Illinois Neurological Institute to share his own story of burnout to encourage others to speak out about their own. Often, hospital systems or other employers have confidential programs to help their employees get the help they need. But physicians need to be willing to ask for it, and doctors often are reluctant to show any sign of weakness in a competitive field. The effects of physician burnout extend far beyond just the physician — all aspects of the health care field are affected, potentially even patient outcomes. “If you’re burned out, you’re not going to be providing great patient care. You’re going to be irritated. You’re going to be angry. You’re going to be (ticked) off. You’re going to be angry with your kids, angry with your spouse,” Avellino said. “You may be burned out, but it’s OK. There are resources that can help.” In his own life, Avellino has found respite in running ultra-marathons, races of 50, 100 miles or more. While that’s brought him great relief, he knows that other physicians need to find their own way to incorporate de-stressers into their days, ideally as part of their work week. Doctors can’t afford to keep piling more onto their already long work days, he said. At OSF Illinois Neurological Institute, Avellino has implemented changes to the organization’s policies to offer physicians and other employees a bit more breathing room. The small changes are part of a “work smarter” approach, Avellino said, that can make a big difference for people who are juggling heavy workloads at work and at home. The approach includes avoiding the scheduling of late and early meetings on the same day, sending only one representative from the office to a meeting and encouraging parents on staff to take the time to drive their kids to school at least once a week. Even a neurosurgeon like Avellino has the time to drive his two teenagers to school at least once a week. The key, he’s found, is marking the time on his office calendar, so that staff know not to schedule anything requiring his attendance during that time. It’s also included working with physicians to tailor job descriptions to what they can reasonably accommodate, something that Abby Lotz, clinical systems care director, has handled directly. “We’re finding that more and more when we recruit physicians that in the very first conversation we have with them, they’re bringing it up,” Lotz said. “It” refers to work-life balance, such as “How long are the hours?” and “How often will I be called in on my days off?” Some want to know they’ll be home in the evening to have dinner with their kids, while others want uninterrupted time off to travel. Office responsibilities have been redistributed to adapt to individual physicians’ schedules and strengths. “Before, we kind of asked the physicians to do a little bit of everything, see all the different kinds of patients, see them in the hospital, see them in the outpatient setting and wear multiple hats. And now we’re really trying to carve that out so that people can focus on a more narrow scope of responsibility, do that well and then better be able to disconnect when they’re off of work,” Lotz said. Lotz, a nurse-turned-administrator and mother of two, has struggled with balancing an advancing career and growing a family. Voicing her frustrations to Avellino was part of what drove these initiatives to implementation in the office. “We’re still learning. We don’t have it perfect by any means but we’re really trying,” she said. Source
