Are you burned out?
(back to first page)

We hear all the time: doctors are burned out! 54% burned out! 76% burned out! Its all portrayed like its some unfortunate rite of passage. Look how horrible it is to be a doctor. Oh well, what’s on TV? No one is making the crucial connections:

  1. Burnout is caused by abusive work environments and abusive system mismanagement

  2. Burnout is likely the leading cause of system dysfunction, quality of care degradation, physician exodus, recruitment failure.

Until this issue is specifically addressed and effectively remedied, there will be no resurrection of publicly-funded public healthcare. No shuffling of healthcare portfolios will make primary healthcare whole. It is not the intention of these documents to speculate that refusing to address burnout is a means to usher family doctors out of primary care, to be replaced by something else. Maybe that’s another discussion.

What is the current state of overall burnout/moral injury amongst family doctors in this province?

Please consider taking this self-administered inventory to assess your own burnout level. The Maslach Burnout Inventory appears to be fairly well validated. There is plenty of deep research into its capabilities. I present to you a version specific to healthcare workers. I would ask that you take the inventory, and keep the revelations it presents to you in mind for both your own efforts to improve your world, but also to consider sharing your scores in the poll on the next page. Also, if you elect me as president of the SFM, I will be very interested in seeking to bring resources to family doctors to rectify this, and to power our decisions on how to fix this mess.

Maslach Burnout Inventory

I am not yet an “expert” in dealing with burnout. But I suspect that I might have to become one in the near future. Burnout is not a shortcoming in the individual. It is wholly a rational response to an abusive environment. My impressions is that this situation is only remedied by:

  • remove the worker from the dysfunctional environment

  • fixing the environment

  • increasing the resilience of the worker (and frankly, this option is rather insulting. No family doctor should be told that they need to be more resilient in order to avoid fixing the absolutely abusive environment they have been expected to endure)

Lets not fix you. Lets make the government fix the environment they created, through demands we dictate.