Confronting Physician Burnout - Help is on the Way
Dr. Laura Cazier is a Board Certified emergency medicine physician who is also helping other doctors deal with burnout and other challenges through life skills coaching. She co-founded The Whole Physician with two other board-certified ED doctors, providing mindset and wellness coaching for physicians, by physicians. In this episode Dr. Cazier shares the reasons why physicians feel burnout, what specialties are most impacted, the issues and reasons why burnout is different between men and women, why physicians don’t seek help, the differences between mental health care and coaching, and what you should do if you or someone you know is struggling.
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Episode Transcript
This transcript was generated using an automated transcription service and is minimally edited. Please forgive the mistakes contained within it.
Patrick Kothe 00:31
Welcome! I'm really excited to bring this episode today because it involves a really important topic. And it's different from one of our usual episodes. But it's so important for our customers. For the healthcare system itself and for us in the medical device industry who support clinicians with our technologies so helps them to be be more effective and caring for their patients. Clinicians, as we all know, are getting burned out faster and more severely than at any time I can remember. And this leads not only to a personal crisis for the clinician, but also a crisis in the healthcare system itself, as trained gifted physicians and pas and nurses are leaving clinical practice because it's just not worth it anymore. Our guest today is Dr. Laura Cazier. She is an emergency medicine physician who experienced burnout herself, but has come out on the other side now is helping other doctors deal with their challenges and develop better coping mechanisms. Through the life skills coaching practice she founded with two other board certified ED Doc's called, The Whole Physician. They also have a podcast, Drive Time Debrief, that provides great content on how to cope better and live a more healthy, fulfilling life. I've personally listened to every episode and I can tell you though, it's geared to clinicians. We're all under stress. And I've taken some of the advice they've shared, and would strongly suggest you give it a listen, I'll put the link to it in the show notes. In this episode, we discuss the reasons why physicians feel burnout. What specialties are most impacted the differences and reasons why burnout is different between men and women. Why physicians don't seek help, the differences between mental health care and coaching and what you should do if you or someone you know, is struggling. I really hope that you enjoy this episode. Here's our conversation. Laura, I'm really looking forward to our discussion today around mental health and physician burnout. But to get things started, can you tell us about your journey to medicine, and what expectations you had when you were just coming into the field?
Laura Cazier, MD 03:18
Okay, so I was not one of those people who knew they wanted to be a doctor from when they were two, I really went to college thinking I was going to be an educator, a teacher. I majored in English and psychology and ultimately dropped the English and wound up with a psychology major and got to the end of my college education. I was I think it was Christmas break my senior year and realize that going to grad school in psychology wasn't gonna wasn't going to work for me. I could not I had written every paper I've ever written the night before. And I could not imagine myself spending six years on a research project and writing a dissertation. So I looked back at my college experience. I had taken many different science courses as electives because I love science. And I thought, you know, maybe I should go to med school med school would be structured. I didn't realize that at the time. I probably have ADHD. My children all have ADHD. And I did not realize that at the time but makes total sense how I wound up as an emergency physician. But I decided med school. That sounds more structured. I can use my psychology which I loved and I can use all the science and I can help people which was something that I just have always had a passion for was being able to help other people feel better. So I go off to medical school That immediately because you don't just decide, you know, and then get to go. The next year I had, I had to take some additional coursework, take the MCAT. And then spend time interviewing. And I remember distinctly in my med school interview at the Medical College of Georgia, which is where I ended up going to school, I was so excited to talk about helping people and how I was going to enjoy helping people develop new healthy habits and help them take care of their bodies, so they wouldn't need to take so much medication. And the guy who was interviewing me was a family medicine faculty member, and he just said, nobody's gonna listen to what you tell them to do, they're not going to change their habits, they're gonna keep smoking and drinking, like basically took a pin and like burst my little bubble. That was at the interview for med school. But I still maintain my desire to help people and was so excited to learn all about the human body and about medicine. And I really have never lost that. There were other things along the way that created burnout in me personally, and every physician will have a different experience. But this was mine i i did very well in medical school, was a member of the Honor Society, which was a really big deal to me and was an undergraduate and got to get into my First Choice Emergency Medicine Residency, which was at Wake Forest and had a great residency training. People who are not in medicine may not realize the depth, and the level of stress and commitment and time. And it just being a residency is a very, very stressful time and medical school as well. It is intense, you're dealing with trauma that you're experiencing from other people's experiences, you're dealing with a lot of personal stress, because there's so much pressure to perform people's lives literally are on the line. As you're making decisions, and you're dealing with little sleep, there's so many things that contribute to a potential for struggling with burnout. So for me, I've always loved emergency medicine. But after going through all this incredibly rigorous training, which really does leave you at the end of it feeling quite exhausted. And if your bubble didn't get popped before, it might be a little deflated at that point. But you and then you enter into medical practice, and things that the my expectations, I think were that I would always enjoy my work that my my husband is also a physician, he's and he tells it like this, he went to the doctor when he was a kid and his doctor was always so jolly, telling jokes. And he thought, Hmm, that seems like a pretty sweet job, you're gonna see people like me, and you're going to be able to tell jokes, and it's going to be great. And the reality is, it's not all people like you people that you relate to. There's a lot of people that suffer with really deep difficult problems that can wear on us just by witnessing them over time. When we're experiencing what we call secondary traumatic stress. We're experiencing other people's trauma. So even someone's hand injury, someone's head injury someone's someone comes in cardiac arrest and we're are not able to resuscitate them. Those things accumulate over time. And that combined with not enough sleep, too many demands elsewhere, too many emotions that have not been adequately processed over time. All of those things can lead to a situation where we're feeling burned out. The Mayo Clinic website has a little article about burnout and I really liked how they define burnout, they they stay burnout is a special type of work related stress is the state of physical exhaustion. That is that also involves a sense of reduced accomplishment and loss of personal identity. So all these things that I've mentioned, kind of can contribute to that and create this situation of burnout for physicians.
Patrick Kothe 10:00
It's so interesting because as you're describing kind of your accomplishments, those get minimized based on the burnout. So, so you, you went to medical school, one of two women in in your residency, some stress there. But then you go and come up with a successful Ed practice. You've got children, you're raising them, you co founded a Leadership Academy. For for kids, you've gone into life coaching, but all of these accomplishments, regardless of how highly functioning you are, sometimes you get broken on the inside because of all of those things that you mentioned. And we're dealing with kind of an epidemic of mental health with it within medicine, and the way that you kind of described your journey. I think it says a lot about what other people are going through as well. Is that is that your experience? Oh, absolutely.
Laura Cazier, MD 10:58
It's so interesting, that pandemic I think, has really shined a spotlight on this. Because the burnout, especially in physicians has gotten so much worse over the past few years. Medscape does a yearly survey of burnout before the pandemic, I think burnout among emergency physicians, which is our our target audience and who we relate to so much, was about 43%, which is really pretty high still, this past year, it was 60%. And I think honestly, it's probably higher. As I look at colleagues and clients that we work with, there's just so much burnout. And we talk about burnout being 70 to 80% of it is institutional or situational. So a lot of it is out of our control and less our hospital system is really focused on trying to mitigate things like making sure that we have enough staffing, making sure that we have enough space to see our patients making sure that we have the equipment, we need that we get adequate time off that we get adequate time to do our charting or other administrative and minimizing administrative duties. So 70 to 80% of it is out of our control about 20 to 30% of it is in our control and is kind of in our minds. And that's the part that we as coaches, we target and help our clients with this to help them realize that some of the suffering that we're enduring at work is is optional, the pandemic really pushed us to a new level of stress, just kind of a new realm of wow, this is really incredibly hard. And this is really hard watching all these people die. And this is really hard going to work and worrying that we might actually die, you know, at the beginning of the pandemic. I remember being afraid before we had any vaccines, I remember being afraid for my life going in and just hoping that everything would be okay. So sometimes in the ER we talk about, we liken ourselves to soldiers in combat, and we don't physically have our life in danger. Every day, although some AR ER doctors get attacked pretty regularly. And there is definitely workplace violence in the emergency department. But it's kind of that feeling of we're doing this thing has to be done without emergency departments. There's no real safety net for society for people who get sick or injured to go to. And so we're doing this really important work. But it's so incredibly stressful and scary at times, honestly,
Patrick Kothe 14:15
I'd like to dig into the research study that you mentioned, because I found some really fascinating things in there. And this was this was done, as you mentioned, it was done in June through September 2021. So probably one of the searches that was going on COVID Is is running, running rampant, don't have the tools to be able to deal with it. And there were still a lot of a lot of anxiety around that. The this particular study was a US based study, people looked at it took an online online survey, over 13,000 physicians 29 specialties, so a real nice cross section of different specialties. But as you mentioned, you know, emergency medicine had, you know, 60% of the people respondents reported burnout. But that wasn't the only one that had high levels of burnout. Over 50% were critical care, OB GYN, infectious disease, Family Medicine, Physical Medicine, and rehab, diabetes, and endocrine endocrinology. All of those were over 50%, burnout. So even though emergency medicine was, was leading the charge there, everyone was dealing with that there was a whole lot of people who were in pain. But I'd also like it to kind of describe men versus women physicians, and kind of put that into context, not only with burnout, but the rates of suicide. Oh, yeah, men and female physicians,
Laura Cazier, MD 15:51
there's so much there. So, physician burnout is particularly severe among women. And the reason for that is multifactorial, a big part of it probably is that women still, no matter how much work they're doing clinically, they are still bearing the brunt of everything at home. So they have children there. And during the pandemic, they were the ones who were doing the homeschooling, they were doing all the meals laundry, many women physicians have some domestic help, but they're still in charge of running that household. There's a minority of women who have stay at home husbands who kind of take care of all that stuff. Most most women who are doctors are still bearing a huge domestic load of work. And that is a full time job by itself. The suicide rate among women physicians is astronomical women. Women who are physicians are four times more likely than a non physician to commit suicide. What is behind that is a whole host of things that we deal with, as we coach our clients, and we coach men and women and they have a lot of the same issues, but some of them are. There's so much perfectionism. Physicians are high achievers, it takes a lot to be able to even get into medical school and then to be successful. It requires a lot and this mindset that we develop through our medical training, most of us start medicine as we pursue excellence, we don't pursue perfection. So we're don't start as perfectionist, but the medical training does something to us, that makes us perfectionists, and it's interesting. And I think that it's changing some now but medical training traditionally has been very shame based, so much shame if you missed something if you didn't have a detail that was needed when you're doing rounds, if any things slipped, there was shame like and bullying, it has traditionally been a pretty toxic environment to do training in. And so we develop these perfectionistic qualities where we do not give ourself any grace for mistakes. It's amazing. These high high achievers amazing humans who are so unkind to themselves, they just tell themselves the most horrible things and I don't honestly don't know where, where all they get this negative narrative. But so many physicians are just really unkind to themselves. That perfectionism that lack of a good self concept and relationship with the self. Also, imposter syndrome. It's very common among physicians were, despite having done so well, in all their education, having done all this training past their boards, past oral boards been in practice for years. They may still feel like if anybody really knew I do not believe didn't belong in this job, whatever. It is so fascinating to me how many people still actually think that way. So, for me what led to my own burnout was I had little, little kids I had at that time I had a three year old and a one year old and I was working crazy hours my husband's an anesthesiologist so he had to leave for work. At 6am. And it's pretty tough to find a nanny at 6am. So I was stuck working this crazy shift from like 4pm to 1am, I had no relief, the pod that I was working on did not, didn't have somebody coming in after me. So I would sometimes still be there a couple hours after shift ended trying to get my patients taking care of some coming home, get home at like three or four in the morning, and then have to be up with little kids and do all the all the mom stuff, doing that over time, and having to witness all these horrible things happening to people. And then along with that, dealing with people who are really not super kind of respectful to you, as a physician, you get to the point where you're just like, really, what, why am I why am I doing this, and I actually left medicine for a couple years, because I was just like, life is too short, I don't need to do I don't need to do this, and were myself completely out. And I didn't understand that really, I had more power than I realized there are ways to make things work so that you're not your family isn't suffering, and you still are able to fulfill that dream, that dream that I had of wanting to be able to help people every day. Thankfully, I was able to find and strike that balance and work on my own mind. So that a lot of these issues that I'm describing didn't like me, but what we find with our clients is that as they work on their mind, and are able to talk to someone else, because part of it is that they become we become so isolated, and we dealt with the shame based culture through our training, they feel ashamed of the thoughts that they're having that they don't feel good enough, even though objectively, they are obviously very good enough. They're outstanding people. And they take excellent care of their patients, but they're, there's no place to really talk about it. So in coaching, we open up that space for them to talk and give them the reality check of like, Hey, you are actually an amazing person, and help them work on the narratives that are kind of going on in their minds. It's amazing what that does, to help with this situation of burnout. And with the suicide, I really just feel like, it's probably so much going on. All this narrative going on in their mind self shaming, and they just get to the point where they really honestly feel like the world would be better without them. And we know that that is just never true. But if we can get people to have an opportunity to talk. And you know, another thing is that doctors are terrible patients, and they're terrible about going to seek meant any mental health help. Or even talking to anyone, they're just, we just, you know, chin up, suck it up, don't don't show any emotion, just get your job done. And so it, it makes it, it makes it tough, it makes it tough to stay sane and not not good.
Patrick Kothe 23:26
Going back to that survey, there was some interesting things in there question was asked, you know, why have you not sought help? I thought that that was pretty revealing. 49% so I could deal with it myself. 43% said that risk disclosure to the medical board. So there's CommBank coming back to that accountability and shaming thing. It's on their insurance record 32% colleagues finding out 25% Medical preferred profession would shun them. 22% And don't trust medical healthcare professionals 11%. So there's a lot of reasons and a lot of that it sounds like it's a lot due to institutional system of education. And but there's also, as you said, this, these are highly functioning very intelligent driven people with expectations thinking I can solve it myself. There's there's there's a lot of that that's in there to that end to kind of follow up on that. It also asks a question, Have you considered using a professional to help reduce burnout 11% said yes, we already have 46% said no but would consider it but 43% said no, I wouldn't consider it. So I'm sure it's due to a lot. You know, a lot of those things that we just discussed, but as you said, you know, the medical profession is a little bit unique in the type of individuals and the type of training and Even though, you know, they talk to their patients about mental health issues, you know, physician heal thyself. I mean, where is it?
Laura Cazier, MD 25:08
It's, it's totally hypocritical. But again, I think you're exactly right. It goes back to the shame culture that we all trained in. And it does continue because many states when you go to renew your medical license every year, there is a question, Are you under the care of a mental health professional, and nobody wants to say that they're, they are the and that is, that is a nice thing about coaching is we, specifically are not mental health professionals, we're coaches, we open the space to talk. And we say if there's, you know, there's overt suicidality, or if they're, if you're having hallucinations, or mania or mental illness, that that really belongs in the sphere of a specified mental health professional that so much of this burnout stuff really just needs, coaching and just need somebody to talk to business executives, C suite guys have, for decades, been getting coaching. And that is the same thing. We are high level professionals, but don't talk to anyone about any issues that are going on in our minds and hearts. Because of the fear that we have of being a being shamed by our by our medical board, by our hospital by our colleagues, it really is a culture that needs to change. And we are seeing it so exciting to be part of a physician coaching collective because we're able to see some change happening. There's there are randomized control trials that have been that are being done and have been published recently that show that coaching really, really works for physicians to help them with these burnout issues. So
Patrick Kothe 27:09
coaching helps all of us, I mean, professional athletes, they still need coaching, yeah, everybody, everybody still needs a coach those. So to think that you can do it yourself. It's not really the best way to get optimal performance, whether you're dealing with you being successful, or avoiding burnout, or you're doing some something particular that you're trying to get better at, you're better to have coaching, because we all like to think we know ourselves, but there's the person that you think you are. And then there's a person that other people see as well. So if you have to rely on other people to help you realize what's going on, and look for different ways of doing it. Because if you're, if you're if you if you know one thing, and that's that's your go to strategy for dealing with something, okay, that might work. But if somebody has seen other strategies on how to deal with a particular thing, they may be able to offer that to you and make you successful, faster, better, more completely.
Laura Cazier, MD 28:13
Absolutely. And one of the things that is the most helpful with coaching is that we don't realize a lot of the lies that we tell ourselves about ourselves, we have a lot of beliefs that we've picked up, you know, maybe as children, or maybe through our schooling, that that just don't serve us and aren't true. And, and a coach, someone outside of ourselves oftentimes can say, Hey, are you sure that that, that that's what you want to believe about yourself? And we think that these things are just how we are or that they're not optional. And we have these expectations that other people need to change instead of us changing. It's super helpful to have someone else just give you it's, like you said, to talk about how you're seen from the outside, to be able to help you realize where it is that your brain is just tripping you up, and give you some objective strategies and maybe some alternative thoughts to these limiting beliefs that we have for ourselves.
Patrick Kothe 29:30
If you're a chubby as a child, and you're not chubby, now, you still may think of yourself as a chubby person. If you were told that you were very bright. As a child, you may consider yourself to be very bright even though you might not be but but what, what we often think of as ourselves is a story that we tell ourselves and if it's if it's a good reinforcing story, great, keep on with it, but if it's not if it's something new negative, you don't need to tell yourself that story anymore. You can change that. But that takes help of somebody coaching you through it.
Laura Cazier, MD 30:09
Yeah, we teach and we teach our clients how to develop self coaching skills as well. When you see a coach, it doesn't mean that you're stuck seeing a coach every week, your whole life, teach skills to help you Yeah, to help you get to where you can do some of it yourself. But coming back to coaching, when new things arise is always helpful. And whenever we find ourselves stuck, there's a that stuck feeling kind of like you talked about, where you still feel chubby, even though you're not no longer chubby, or, or maybe you are Toby. And you are you telling yourself that that's just who you are your whole life, I would offer that maybe that's not a thought that's, that's actually serving you on it's optional. We can think of some alternatives to help you be your very best.
Patrick Kothe 31:09
I want to get back to the survey for a second, because one of the things that really struck me through here is this was, as I said, this was taken in peak COVID times, and the question was asked what contributes to your burnout. And I would have thought COVID I mean, that would be that would have been the biggest thing, emergency rooms are over overrun. COVID situations. The number one reason why people said they had burnout was too many bureaucratic tasks. Yes, now, I'm not a physician, I've got a daughter who's a physician, and she was in a primary care setting. And you know that, you know, the drill, it's it's tournament, you know, get your 2530 patients in there. And you can't always do your charting. There, you got to do your charting at home at night and you got kids at home. I mean, it's it's not a it's not that good. A good situation for many people. And the EMR has kind of done that to physicians as your as your a slave to the EMR and charting. But I found it again, dealing in the COVID time, that's the number one and and COVID didn't didn't hit for a while its lack of respect of of your colleagues, too many hours, lack of controller autonomy, salary, computerization of practice, government regulations, then you started getting hit the stress from social distancing and stress, stress from COVID. After all of those other things, I was shocked. I was shocked by that, that that that it wasn't COVID that was causing is all of these other things.
Laura Cazier, MD 32:51
Yeah. Well, there have been a lot of changes over the last several years regarding documentation requirements and administrative tasks. And having to have an electronic medical record has become a burden for almost all physicians, I would say, unless we have one that is very intuitive and quick, and that we feel very comfortable with. But most most physicians, I mean, in my experience, if you talk to physicians, a lot of them are dissatisfied with their electronic medical record. We had a really great one. A few years ago, we had it for years, and it was wonderful. But then our hospital administration decided to switch. And it added for me personally, at least five minutes per patient I was seeing in documentation time. And so adding that up over time, it really it really does. It feels frustrating. It feels like we're doing this meaningless to us work. Really, what we want to be doing is caring for patients, but we're doing so much computer based work and it's just not. It's just not gratifying. So and then we have lots of other responsibilities. We have other hospital meetings, we have to go to anything outside of our clinical work that we do generally physicians don't get paid for and so you're home charting for hours, not getting paid for that you're not getting paid for going to serve on committees, you're really expected to do things that people in other professions don't do a lot of work that they're not paid for. But that can definitely wear on you and make you feel like the what I really want to be doing is caring for patients, but I'm having to do all this other stuff that doesn't provide meaning for me and I don't feel like I really have any control over whether I have to do it or not.
Patrick Kothe 34:51
I can't count the number of physicians who I've spoken with that have asked me about different ways of being a physician. One and getting getting out of getting out of that game. Yep. And moving moving into into a different game. And on one hand, you know, personal growth is a great thing. On the other hand, we're losing a tremendous amount of talent and, and a tremendous amount amount of, of gifts that people have for dealing with patients. And we don't have enough enough physicians to begin with, and and having people leave the profession, without new people coming up behind. It's a real problem for us, especially at the primary care level. We want to recognize people to be able to move into different things. But there's other ways to do it, how can we be better at treating the treating the physicians, so that they don't feel like they're burnt out. So they don't feel like they have to look for something else, that they feel confident that that what they're doing is making a difference so that they feel that they're supported. So they feel like they they can can thrive in the environment as opposed to getting beat down. So let's let's talk a little bit about, you know, some of the things that that you're putting in place right now, and what the whole physician is all about, and what coaching is all about and how you can help people to get past where they are?
Laura Cazier, MD 36:21
Well, so much of that we you know, as I mentioned before, 70 to 80%, of burnout issues are institutional. So, a lot, there are some initiatives that some hospitals are doing to target wellness among physicians. That is, they're the minority right now. But we expect that that will grow over time, because as you mentioned, is we're in a crisis situation in terms of having enough physicians, as individual physicians, we can control about 20 to 30%, of this burnout issue for ourselves. And so much of that just comes down to our mindset. And so we add the whole physician in there's three or three er Doc's and we're all life coaches, like we call ourselves physician coaches, but we're life coaches, for physicians. And as I described, really what we do is, is help people to examine what's actually really happening, what is what is being created by unproductive thoughts that we're having, and how do we get to our best life, our best works situation, our best health, we help people with specific health goals as well. And we do this on an individual basis. We're all we also work with hospitals who want their physicians to have access to coaching, we have one hospital that bought coaching for all their Doc's. So those doctors are getting one on one coaching and some instruction about specifically how to overcome some of these challenges that we've accumulated over time, how to improve our mindset so that we feel our very best dealing with the challenges that we know that we have. So we have some hospitals that have purchased that for their doctors. We offer CME or continuing medical education for our coaching program, we have a program that has didactic lectures and additional work in addition to the coaching that offers credit for doctors so they can use their CME money on it, or they can their hospital can again, buy it as a CME expense for them, lots of different ways that we, ourselves are working with physicians and and their institutions to help bring coaching to them. It's just exciting that this is a it definitely is a very effective tool to impact burnout, there have been multiple randomized control trials now to show that this above anything else, on the personal level is what is helping doctors overcome a lot of this burnout. So we also have a podcast that where we talk about a lot of these mindset principles to help for someone who isn't ready to say okay, I do want to talk to a coach. They can listen to our podcast and learn a lot there.
Patrick Kothe 39:27
What's interesting is the name, name of your company and name of the podcast and name of the company as a whole physician name of the podcast is Dr. Time debrief of physician wellness podcast. Neither one of these do you say we're the burnout, prod podcast, we're a mental health. Was that done on purpose that you're softening the entry into this topic?
Laura Cazier, MD 39:55
Regarding the name of the podcast? A debrief is something that we Do in the emergency department after there's been, for instance, a code or there was a mass casualty event or things that happened. And we can look at what happened. And we can talk about what we did that we liked, what we would do differently next time. And then we talked about, ideally, we talked about the feelings, and the humanity of the people that we treated. That's why we chose that name is because we want to help, especially our ER doc friends, or other physicians going to work are coming home from work to have a minute to really do something for themselves and help themselves process the things that they experience in their work and to feel better. We are not mental health professionals, we love talking about mental health topics, but we definitely not people who would be like treating bipolar disorder or a major depressive episode or things like that. We talk about wellness. It really, we are talking about whole wellness, we help doctors not only with their mindset, but with, as I mentioned, any physical health goals that they have some doctors are really terrible at taking care of themselves. And we help provide some accountability for them as they as they try to make changes and change their own habits.
Patrick Kothe 41:26
Sometimes when you're dealing with stress, when you're dealing with burnout, you your feelings, you drink your feelings, you drug your feelings. And it's no different for physicians, and it is for anybody else in the population.
Laura Cazier, MD 41:42
Ironically, it is not.
Patrick Kothe 41:47
Well, this has really been a fascinating look into burnout issues and mental health with with clinicians. But it doesn't stop with with clinicians, you know, we're dealing with all people, the listeners here are people within the medical device ecosystem. So are there some some things that you can talk to us about? That can help us all whether we're a physician or not recognize that we're having an issue? And what should we do if we recognize it, either ourselves or somebody else? Is probably in a going into a into a bad space?
Laura Cazier, MD 42:30
Yeah, well, there's so many different things and that you can so many different symptoms that you could identify, specifically for burnout, or we like to call it moral injury, that someone who's becoming more cynical, more sarcastic, and all the air doctors are like, that's just who we are.
Patrick Kothe 42:52
I can attest to that. Yeah, but really,
Laura Cazier, MD 42:54
that's not who they are. That's really not who they are. That's not how they started. If you're more irritable, you have unexplained physical complaints, you're you're buffering as we call, like you said, you're eating feelings, you're numbing out with Netflix, or with alcohol or drugs, anything where we're like, hey, life is just not really what I thought it was going to be. And I'm kind of cranky, tired and miserable all the time. These are things to pay attention to, and look for some help, whether it be coaching or whatever help you can stomach, just get some get some help.
Patrick Kothe 43:37
Sometimes we realize that than ourselves. And we're able to take action, sometimes we're not able to realize it ourselves. What's a good way for you to approach someone who you think may be on the wrong path and could benefit from some outside help?
Laura Cazier, MD 43:58
Well, what we always invite people to do is to approach people with curiosity and not judgment, and cure. What that means is to really be curious and ask someone how they're doing and express your care for them. And say, you know, I see this in you and I just really want to help you if you're open to some help, and specifically about suicidality. If you're concerned that someone is considering suicide, that person really, really need some mental health, attention so that that person doesn't need to go see a coach, that person needs to be seen by their medical doctor or a mental health professional. If you are concerned about someone's well being just saying, hey, and being specific, like hey, are you thinking about suicide? Don't be afraid to Say that word, because it needs to be said that's the thing that will really elicit what's going on and, and help you understand kind of what the risk is. But if it's someone who is just generally struggling, oftentimes just having having someone reach out and know that someone cares and notice them is a tremendous benefit for them. Definitely, don't be afraid to ask specifically about suicide. So if you see someone who looks depressed, say, You know what, sometimes I think people who feel sad, think about suicide, is that something that you're thinking about, and if so, get that person, bring him to see us in the emergency department, we will, we will. I love taking care of people who have these issues, because I feel like it's a place to really make a lot of impact, and help them in that really difficult space that they're in. So bring him to see us and the emotions.
Patrick Kothe 46:07
As I mentioned at the beginning, this topic is important to all of us. And I appreciate Dr. Because here's insights, and how she dealt with her own burnout, and also the crisis that we're all facing. I appreciate the leadership she and her partners are showing to help clinicians navigate some pretty tough waters. A few of my takeaways. First, recognize that our customers are dealing with a lot, your product is probably not the most important thing in their life. However, the products that we provide sometimes can help make their life easier. Just make sure that you enter into a conversation with a clinician when they're open to it, not on your time on theirs. Second, once you talked about coaching being different than mental health care, and that's a very important, very important point. And I hope the message gets through to hospitals and clinicians to help them overcome the hesitancy they have to dealing with issues in their own personal lives. Maybe this is even something that you can gently enter into a conversation about. It could be Hey, this is something I listened to. Here's some research on burnout, I found interesting. Have that be an entree into a conversation a gentle entree into that conversation. Finally, check your mental health and those around you. Don't be afraid to check yourself. Don't be afraid to talk to others around you. And when she discussed asking about suicide, it may be something that's very uncomfortable to you ask about, but it may be the most important question you ever asked. Thank you for listening. Make sure you get episodes downloaded to your device automatically by liking or subscribing to the mastering medical device podcast wherever you get your podcasts. Also, please spread the word until a friend or two to listen to the mastering medical device podcast as interviews like today's can help you become a more effective medical device leader. Work hard. Be kind
