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Burnout is painful and discouraging in any workplace; In a hospital, it can be a killer.
About 1 in 10 physicians reported making a major medical error in the previous three months in a national survey of more than 6,000 US physicians published in Mayo Clinic Proceedings . Just over half of the physicians surveyed said they were burned, and the study authors found that these doctors were twice as likely to report errors.
Medicine has taken a page of aviation for a decade or so. checklists and flattening hierarchies among physicians, nurses and other clinicians with the aim of reducing medical errors. This approach may neglect the well-being of the doctors themselves, says author of the Tait Shanafelt study at Stanford University – with consequences for the rest of us.
Medical errors are the third leading cause of death in the United States, behind heart disease and cancer, according to a BMJ study. The direct economic costs could rise to more than $ 20 billion and the opportunity costs of the loss of more than 250,000 workers a year could rise to about $ 200 billion a year .
In their analysis of the survey, Shanafelt and his colleagues check errors at some rotted apples. Instead, they found that error rates increased with fatigue levels. So even doctors who are a bit more tired are more dangerous for their patients.
Better leadership could be part of the solution.
A Mayo Clinic 2015 study found that doctors who rated their leaders favorably were less likely to report Burnout. And medicine is already borrowing from companies, with some institutions providing executive coaches and offering doctors sessions on mindfulness and positive psychology. And last year, a meta-analysis of studies in the Journal of the American Medical Association revealed that organizational reorganizations could make a small, but noticeable difference in the reduction of Exhaustion of doctors.
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