In order for physicians to provide high quality care, they must first receive it. In the health care profession, there’s always a lot of emphasis placed on excellence in patient care. While this is undoubtedly important, the same amount of energy should be directed towards ensuring high quality care for the physicians themselves by the hospitals. Medical professionals are often either treated like machines or are forced to operate interact with them constantly, as they are forced to comply with hospital regulations. It’s time we discuss how to provide better quality care for our physicians—making our expectations more realistic, giving them the freedom to foster relationships, and trusting them with leadership positions. Quality care tip #1: treat physicians like people first Physicians spend their careers doing superhuman things—delivering babies, saving lives, inventing miracle drugs, and the like. But we often forget that these physicians are still just human, with the same needs and limitations as anyone else. Rather than acknowledging this, we continue to push them harder, demand more, extend their hours, and prevent them from participating in significant life events. Physicians have always prided themselves in their resiliencies throughout school and their career, and do it happily and passionately. So they continue to comply with third-party demands and take on additional responsibilities that negatively impact their own well-being and their patients. Speaking up about exhaustion and abuse is stigmatized as unprofessional—it’s no wonder the burnout rate is more than 50%and climbing! It’s time we take a stand for our fellow physicians and provide the same quality care for them that we expect from them. Based on a recent medical poll, 86% of Public Favor 16-Hour Cap on Resident Hours for first-year medical residents. The statistics are staggering on how much error, car accidents, and suicides increase due to lack of sleep among those in the medical profession. We need to start advocating for ourselves and each other if we expect anyone else to do the same. Quality care tip #2: help physicians connect with patients The health care system invests so much energy into efficiency and new technology, that they become barriers to the doctor-patient relationship. Physicians are not only expected to operate like machines, but they are required to operate with machines more than the patients they desire to connect with and serve. In fact, studies show that for every hour physicians spend with a patient, they spend two hours with their electronic health record (EHR). Not only is this detrimental to the doctor-patient relationship and quality care for our patients, EHR’s lead to higher burnout rates and less fulfillment for the physicians themselves. Government needs to take an active role in amending stringent hospital mandates and procedures that create a barrier rather than a bridge between physicians and patients. Investing in the doctor-patient relationship has medical benefits as well. Too often medicine operates between two extremes—a patient is left to reach a decision on their own with their family, or physicians make a decision for them that they do not fully understand. Shared decision-making, a crucial aspect of quality care and satisfaction, has become a lost art and needs to be resuscitated for the sake of all. Quality care tip #3: trust physicians with leadership positions Generally, physicians like to be in on the ground floor with their patients—it’s their passion for helping people and immediate rewards of their work that keep them motivated during long, arduous shifts. However, there seems to be a gap between the leaders, managers, and policy-makers in health care and the physicians carrying them out. For example, those who created the EHR system were not medically trained or had never stepped foot in an exam room to understand the implications of such a process. Those creating the merit-based programs and regulating health care costs are actually doing more harm than good. This is not to say you have to be a doctor to be a health care policy maker or hospital manager, but you must certainly and heavily consult the physicians who your policies will most directly affect. As in any profession, physicians with a high level of passion and aptitude for what they do should step into leadership positions. We need policy makers who know exactly what it’s like to be in the shoes of a physician so they can come up with solutions that help and not hinder the process. We need hospital managers who understand firsthand the pressures and demands of long-hour shifts. We need physicians who are not only concerned about providing high quality care for patients, but also for the physicians on whom those patients depend—and leaders who are not only dedicated to healing patients directly, but our broken medical system as a whole. Source
