Here’s more about burned-out doctors. After I posted my physician burnout report (see that here), someone sent me the program of the American Conference on Physician Health that was held just days earlier (October 11-13) in Palm Desert, California. (For more resources on doctor burnout click here.)

This was the 7^th annual Conference on Physician Health, each one sponsored by the American Medical Association, the Mayo Clinic and Stanford Medicine. These conferences were designed “to inspire organizations throughout the country to seek ways to bring back the joy in medicine for all our physicians.”  (My emphasis.)

I was told that a doctor who attended the most recent conference returned to work and discovered he had 35 patients to see. A prescription for more burnout?

Have these conferences been popular? The digital program of this year’s event indicated, on the cover page, that it was SOLD OUT! And there was a waiting list!

What topics have these conferences covered?

Here’s a sample of some representative titles from this year’s conference. Many focused on instilling well-being in burned-out doctors.

• Breaking down barriers around emergency medicine physicians seeking mental health care.
• An innovative medical staff-run approach to the drivers of burnout and joy in work.
• Association of physician burnout with perceived EHR (electronic health records) work, stress, and potentially actionable factors.
• Creating a culture of wellness.
• Drowning in email: the cost of email burden on physician burnout.
• Heal thyself: leveraging CME education to improve provider wellness behavior.
• Pebble in my shoe: a program to address micro-annoyances encountered by physicians in the workplace.
• Significant higher rates of burnout at a tertiary eye care center found after the start of COVID-19.
• The impact of Sudarshan Kriya Yoga (SKY) breathing on mental health and well-being of physicians: a Canadian experience.
• The intentional well-being retreat: an evaluation of a wellness retreat for physicians and advanced practice providers.

ALL OF THESE TOPICS (AND MANY MORE) WERE PART OF POSTER PRESENTATIONS ON THE FIRST AFTERNOON OF THE THREE-DAY CONFERENCE. CLEARLY, THIS IS A BIG TOPIC AMONG PHYSICIANS.

Conclusion

Doctor burnout is real. And it obviously is bad for physicians — and for their patients. It is time for governmental and insurance regulators to back off and allow these professional men and women to do their jobs as they know best!