Taking Burnout Avenue on your Way to Nowhere

Burnout In Healthcare:
A Guide to Addressing the Epidemic

Author: Rajeev Kurapati, MD, MBA

Publisher: Sajjana Publishing, Middletown, DE, 2019

I read this book because I thoroughly enjoyed Rajeev Kurapati’s 2018 treatise on Physician: How Science Transformed the Art of Medicine. While that one was intended to help us be aware of what was going on these days in the field of medicine, his new book is intended to tell medical workers what is going on with them. And in the process, Kurapati gives every worker, no matter the field (for we are all workers whether we get paid or not), some excellent advice on how to recognize how burnout enters and impacts our lives and what to do about it.

Rajeev, a Hospitalist in Kentucky -- yes, that’s the term applied to doctors whose main responsibility is patients in hospitals -- opens his book with a question for healthcare workers: “You’re devoted to helping your patients. But who’s helping you?”  Unfortunately, the answer is often or almost always, “No one.”  Thus, his book.

Like any illness that patients face, Kurapati says you can’t treat burnout unless you recognize it.  And recognizing burnout is easier said than done.  One reason is the ultra-slow pace with which it emerges. Once recognized, the author suggests that what is needed is resilience – both organizational and individual.  And oftentimes, the latter must reign supreme because of the failure of the former.

If healthcare providers have reached the stage of feeling like the joy of (practicing) medicine is gone, then they’re well on their way to burnout if not already there. Using real-life examples of many of his colleagues (names have been changed for confidentiality), Kurapati describes how burnout starts and creeps up gradually until it’s too late. For example, there is a difference between stress and burnout. Knowing the difference is worth the price of the book. The author deals with each of the ‘masks’ that burnout hides behind including depersonalization (not really caring about your patients as people), exhaustion, apathy, anxiety, dread, irritability, impatience, the lack of will to work, sleep disturbances, loss of appetite, craving comfort food, body aches and pains, and still worse, using drugs, alcohol, and other substances as a replacement for energy and health.

He takes special pain to try to get at the causes of burnout and focuses on ‘the system’ as well as the ‘digitization’ of one’s medical practice.  He warns us that the presence of success does not guarantee the absence of burnout – the relationship may in fact be the inverse.

He spends a whole chapter suggesting what hospital and clinic administrators can do to fight off burnout in their healthcare workers starting with the recognition that burnout is a systemic issue.  His last chapter focuses on what you as an individual worker must do even if the institution you work for doesn’t do anything.

The book is a good read for all of us.  And it would be worth your while to get a copy for a healthcare practitioner you love.

The copy I received came with an insert – a quote from the book: “Your goal is to feel more alive and less attached to your worries – to break free from the patterns of your mind.  To be able to do this is the hallmark of resilience.”

Can you do that?  Can you help someone else do that?

Ken B. Godevenos, President, Accord Resolutions Services Inc., Toronto, Ontario, October 12, 2019, www.accordconsulting.com

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