Monitoring Physician's Wellbeing

Providing some links to articles from The Lancet which monitor the
health of physicians.

Physician wellness: a missing quality indicator

• Physician, heal thyself

• The Lancet, Volume 377, Issue 9775, 23–29 April 2011, Page 1380   PDF (69 K)

• Doctors get ill too

• The Lancet, Volume 374, Issue 9702, 14–20 November 2009, Page 1653  PDF (69 K)

Summary:

When physicians are unwell, the performance of health-care systems can be suboptimum. Physician wellness might not only benefit the individual physician, it could also be vital to the delivery of high-quality health care. We review the work stresses faced by physicians, the barriers to attending to wellness, and the consequences of unwell physicians to the individual and to health-care systems. We show that health systems should routinely measure physician wellness, and discuss the challenges associated with implementation.

Conclusion:

The first step to incorporation of physician wellness as a quality indicator is to promote dialogue among key stakeholders (physician groups, health-system decision makers, payers, and the general public) about the components needed in such a quality-indicator system to best measure physician and organisational wellness, and the interventions needed to improve physician and organisational wellness. Assessment of physician wellness as an indicator of an organisation's quality of health care is only the first step. Increased awareness of the importance of physician wellness, both individually and organisationally, is needed by physicians, their patients, and their employers. A shift in the culture of care and wellness of physicians is necessary. If these groups do not recognise the crucial importance of physician wellness, there is little reason to expect that physicians and their employers will invest in taking better care of physicians, or that the public will support and appreciate such efforts.

Ultimately, individual physicians will personally benefit from taking better care of themselves. Such efforts would probably lead to increased job satisfaction and overall wellbeing, and reduced likelihood of physicians experiencing an overwhelming sense of stress and burnout. The organisations employing physicians will benefit by having more productive and efficient health-care providers in conjunction with reduced absenteeism, job turnover, and recruitment and retention issues. And perhaps the patients themselves will benefit by receiving better quality of care.