“Returning smiles” to medicine

摘要

Very recently, Shetty and Arora carried out a national survey on the residents’satisfaction level 1, and I applaud and compliment them for their efforts. They provocatively title their manuscript— Is someone listening? My riposte, or shall I call it repartee—Can we afford not to listen? Physician burn-out and attrition is now a well-established global phenomenon. Though burn-out may be ubiquitous across all professions and arenas of life, but it assumes a very special importance in relevance to medicine, as it does not stay individual but affects health-care delivery and thereby the health of the community. It thus assumes a much grander and larger scale, and as Tait Shanafeldt from Mayo Clinic, Rochester, Minnesota would have it put, BIf it affects half of our physicians, it is indirectly affecting half of our patients.^ Such is the seriousness of the issue that the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) catalyst published a series of articles in June 2017 2 exhorting medical profession—BSolutions are urgently needed.^ However, to the very contrary, when asked what the organization is doing to address the issue of physician burn-out, many of the NEJM Catalyst Survey respondents replied, Bnothing,^ Bnot enough,^ Bpaying lip service,^ and Btalking about the problem in committees but no action plan yet.^ Already in India, we are struggling with an acute shortage of manpower and if we do not care of what we already have, we will end up with an attrition rate of almost one-third of medical professionals, extrapolating and going by the western standards 3.