The physical and psychological demands of careers in medicine and healthcare are well known. Beyond the daunting, years-long pre-professional path required of all practitioners, a disproportionate work-life balance and oftentimes hectic daily environment await them after their training is complete. Mounting research has demonstrated the toll of stress, fatigue, and burnout on healthcare workers’ clinical performance and their patients’ quality of life.
A clear solution can be found in reducing the overwhelming pressure medical practitioners experience in the workplace. But should the responsibility of stress-management and work-life fall on the workers? How much control do workers actually have over their stress levels as they operate under external conditions that are stress-inducing?
On one hand, our healthcare system requires them to face emotionally and physically taxing responsibilities. For example, healthcare workers face high-stakes expectations surrounding the health and comfort of patients and their families. However, the patience, emotional stamina, and time required by this approach is deeply draining—and damaging to clinical practice when made routine. Brown et al. (2009) found that emotionally taxing duties, such as informing patients of a negative or a fatal prognosis, increased doctors’ stress levels and correlated with fatigue, burnout, and poor patient communication. These steps are effectively cemented in the process, despite the apparent negative effects on patient care.
Furthermore, the entire path towards becoming a healthcare worker—from college to residency—involves immense sacrifices of time and social life, as well as intense commitment to learning the profession. Saadat et al. (2016) showed substantially higher levels of sleep deprivation and cognitive exhaustion among anesthesiologists who were on call for 17 hours overnight as opposed to working a normal workday. These long shifts with unmanageable patient loads, especially in understaffed hospitals, make a physically- and emotionally-balanced life impossible for doctors and nurses.
This stressful reality impairs healthcare workers’ ability to provide more personalized and emotion-centered attention to patients, a necessary element to quality care. Langer et al. (1975) demonstrated that patients who had more personalized, emotion-centered, and communicative interactions with doctors recovered faster and experienced less pain after major surgery than those who simply received standardized information about the procedure. Langer has also published many studies showing how perceptions of stressful circumstances—that is, the perception of and not the reality of the circumstances themselves—cause the physical and emotional experience of stress, indicating that individuals have more control over their mental state than external situations. To a certain extent, doctors and nurses should be held accountable for incorporating these methods into their patient interactions to fulfill their duties more successfully, regardless of what objective pressures they may face. However, under current circumstances, it simply is not fair to expect healthcare professionals to adopt these superior modes of patient care when doing so would only exacerbate the exhaustion and burnout they already face.
The answer to this seemingly impossible problem lies in making changes to the structure of our healthcare system on an institutional level, allowing doctors to practice mindful stress-management practices. The first step is for administrative structures to invest in research that would reveal the systemic changes needed to better support healthcare workers. Using such data, they could foster a more positive learning environment for graduate students, reduce the administrative burdens in hospitals, improve medical technology, and bolster mental health resources for these workers to move the issue in the right direction.
About the Author
Aubrienne Krysiewicz-Bell is a senior at Harvard College concentrating in Neuroscience with a secondary in History of Art and Architecture.
References
A clear solution can be found in reducing the overwhelming pressure medical practitioners experience in the workplace. But should the responsibility of stress-management and work-life fall on the workers? How much control do workers actually have over their stress levels as they operate under external conditions that are stress-inducing?
On one hand, our healthcare system requires them to face emotionally and physically taxing responsibilities. For example, healthcare workers face high-stakes expectations surrounding the health and comfort of patients and their families. However, the patience, emotional stamina, and time required by this approach is deeply draining—and damaging to clinical practice when made routine. Brown et al. (2009) found that emotionally taxing duties, such as informing patients of a negative or a fatal prognosis, increased doctors’ stress levels and correlated with fatigue, burnout, and poor patient communication. These steps are effectively cemented in the process, despite the apparent negative effects on patient care.
Furthermore, the entire path towards becoming a healthcare worker—from college to residency—involves immense sacrifices of time and social life, as well as intense commitment to learning the profession. Saadat et al. (2016) showed substantially higher levels of sleep deprivation and cognitive exhaustion among anesthesiologists who were on call for 17 hours overnight as opposed to working a normal workday. These long shifts with unmanageable patient loads, especially in understaffed hospitals, make a physically- and emotionally-balanced life impossible for doctors and nurses.
This stressful reality impairs healthcare workers’ ability to provide more personalized and emotion-centered attention to patients, a necessary element to quality care. Langer et al. (1975) demonstrated that patients who had more personalized, emotion-centered, and communicative interactions with doctors recovered faster and experienced less pain after major surgery than those who simply received standardized information about the procedure. Langer has also published many studies showing how perceptions of stressful circumstances—that is, the perception of and not the reality of the circumstances themselves—cause the physical and emotional experience of stress, indicating that individuals have more control over their mental state than external situations. To a certain extent, doctors and nurses should be held accountable for incorporating these methods into their patient interactions to fulfill their duties more successfully, regardless of what objective pressures they may face. However, under current circumstances, it simply is not fair to expect healthcare professionals to adopt these superior modes of patient care when doing so would only exacerbate the exhaustion and burnout they already face.
The answer to this seemingly impossible problem lies in making changes to the structure of our healthcare system on an institutional level, allowing doctors to practice mindful stress-management practices. The first step is for administrative structures to invest in research that would reveal the systemic changes needed to better support healthcare workers. Using such data, they could foster a more positive learning environment for graduate students, reduce the administrative burdens in hospitals, improve medical technology, and bolster mental health resources for these workers to move the issue in the right direction.
About the Author
Aubrienne Krysiewicz-Bell is a senior at Harvard College concentrating in Neuroscience with a secondary in History of Art and Architecture.
References
- Brown, R., Dunn, S., Byrnes, K., Morris, R., Heinrich, P., & Shaw, J. (2009). Doctors' stress responses and poor communication performance in simulated bad-news consultations. Academic medicine: Journal of the Association of American Medical Colleges, 84(11), 1595–1602. https://doi.org/10.1097/ACM.0b013e3181baf537
- Langer, E., Janis, I., & Wolfer, J. (1975). Reduction of psychological stress in surgical patients. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. Retrieved October 23, 2022, from https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022103175800187
- Saadat, H., Bissonnette, B., Tumin, D., Thung, A., Rice, J., Barry, N., & Tobias, J. (2016). Time to talk about work-hour impact on anesthesiologists: The effects of sleep deprivation on Profile of Mood States and cognitive tasks. Pediatric anesthesia, 26(1), 66–71. https://doi.org/10.1111/pan.12809
