burnout

Image credit: Pexels Author: Ryan P. Gibney, MD Originally published: Common SenseMarch/April 2021 It definitely felt different this new year. The normal buzz around town, packed stores, twinkling lights, and family gatherings uncharacteristically muted as compared to years past. I noticed a profound change in the hospital starting in mid-November: the winter chill was ever […]

Image Credit: Pexels Author: Arlene Chung, MD MACM FAAEMOriginally published: Common Sense May/June 2019 My nightmare is waking up to a phone call in the middle of the night with a frantic chief resident telling me that one of our residents is dead. We shouldn’t be teaching our doctors how to be well. Teaching the […]

Image Credit: Common Sense Author: Nick Pettit, DO PhDOriginally published: Common Sense January/February 2019 Very few jobs, let alone, medical specialties have the potential to encounter death on a daily basis. With this comes responsibility, honor, reward, pride, but also despair, death, and failure. Politics and biases aside, as clinicians, it is engrained early in […]

Image Credit: Common Sense Author: Faith Quenzer, DOAAEM/RSA At-Large Board MemberOriginally Published: Common Sense July/August 2018 I wasn’t out of the woods yet. After the birth of my first child, my son would keep me up every two to three hours a night. This was not what I imagined life to be as a mother. […]

Image Credit: Pixabay Author: Meaghan Mercer, MD2014-2015 RSA PresidentOriginally Published: Common Sense May/June 2014 Emergency medicine is a specialty known for high burnout. Professional burnout is described and measured in many different ways, but it encompasses a loss of enthusiasm for work, emotional exhaustion, disparagement, depersonalization, a loss of empathy, and feeling a lack personal […]