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BioEdge: Global epidemic of doctor burnout must be confronted, says The Lancet

BioEdge: Global epidemic of doctor burnout must be confronted, says The Lancet

Bioedge

Global epidemic of doctor burnout must be confronted, says The Lancet

by Michael Cook | 13 Jul 2019 |

There is a world-wide epidemic of physician burnout, according to an editorial in The Lancet. “The need for health system reform in response to physician burnout cannot be delayed,” it contends.

In the United States, burnout affects 78% of physicians and in the United Kingdom 80%. It is a “crisis”, says The Lancet, “in many high-income countries because it not only affects physicians' personal lives and work satisfaction but also creates severe pressure on the whole health-care system—particularly threatening patients' care and safety.”

The problem may be particularly acute in China and in other low and middle-income countries, although data on the problem is scarce.

A 2015 article in the Chinese Medical Journal painted a bleak picture of overwork, pressure to publish, professional competition and demanding and sometimes violent patients. Sudden death from heart attacks amongst surgeons and anaesthetists was an acute problem.

The Lancet observes that the problem is complex and will require huge cultural changes:

Addressing physician burnout on an individual level will not be enough, and meaningful steps to address the crisis and its fundamental causes must be taken at systemic and institutional levels with concerted efforts from all relevant stakeholders. Tackling physician burnout requires placing the problem within different contexts of workplace culture, specialties, and gender … With rapid development of medical sciences, it is time to use medical advances to benefit the health and wellbeing of all people, including physicians themselves.

Michael Cook is editor of BioEdge

Michel Houellebecq and Pope Francis are two names seldom found in the same sentence. Yet they are united in decrying the death of Vincent Lambert, the disabled French nurse who died this week after having his food and water removed.

Being the head of the Catholic Church, Pope Francis’s views are, and are supposed to be, predictable. But Houellebecq, France’s most acclaimed and controversial novelist, is hardly a spokesman for traditional values. His novels are grotesque, nihilistic, pornographic, vulgar, cynical, and misogynistic. But, with the unsparing honesty of a true artist, he sees exactly what was going on:

"Vincent Lambert was in no way prey to unbearable suffering, he was not suffering any pain at all (...) He was not even at the end of life. He lived in a particular mental state, the most honest of which would be to say that we know almost nothing …

As he points out, it is ironic that France’s minister for health is called the “Minister of Health and Solidarity”. Solidarity with whom?