Burn-out is a syndrome conceptualized as resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed.
Clinicians and other healthcare workers, as well as trainees and students, face diverse, cumulative, and synergistic toxic exposures that can lead to distress.
Many organizations don’t think about the impacts of stress on their workforce in a systematic way when designing their organizational policy. How could they? Policies grow over time, and often are reactive rather than proactive. These are the key concepts Greenleaf uses to assess the current Stress Responsiveness of an organization and support the leadership in making more stress responsive policy decisions.
Any stress, both positive stress (excitement) and negative stress (nervousness), involves the autonomic nervous system (ANS). The ANS functions in the background every second of our lives. It regulates the human body’s most basic regulatory processes, including breathing, heart rate, blood pressure, and digestion.
Though burnout and trauma exposure have different causes and symptoms – and require different interventions and remedies – it’s well established that both are highly toxic to the wellbeing, resilience, and health of employees.
Imagine you and a friend are going down a sidewalk and a dog lunges at both of you. For you, the incident may be forgotten in a matter of minutes. Your friend, however, has heart palpitations and then he stays in a funk for an hour. Why is this?
Workplaces are full of demands – most face some levels of uncertainty, pressures, and unpredictability. In addition, many of Greenleaf’s clients face more serious stressors, such as potential injury to themselves or their co-workers or the threat of violence.
Most employers don’t realize that a significant percentage of people with symptoms of a mental health or substance use condition doesn’t receive appropriate treatment. Instead, they suffer in silence, which creates struggles across many areas of life – including their engagement and performance and work.
Although it’s been two weeks since the anniversary and remembrances of 9/11, I find myself still reflecting on how it changed the lives of so many, including my own. The horrors of that day occurred only two months after I started my residency at Mount Sinai Hospital in NYC.
A group of over 400 healthcare leaders – the majority physicians – convened in the smoky particulate plume of San Francisco last week to attend the American Conference on Physician Health. The theme this year was “Finding Joy in Medicine”.
