Welcome to the Journey
The Burnout Antidote: Infusing Well-being into Healthcare Culture
Release Date: 11/15/2023
Reflections and Blazing New Trails
The Burnout Antidote: Infusing Well-being into Healthcare Culture
In the series wrap-up show, co-hosts Amy Pearlman and Paul Deger reflect on the stories we’ve heard, the lessons we’ve learned, and the tools we’ve obtained during our journey exploring moral distress, burnout, and self-compassion in healthcare. Our series shed light on the challenges healthcare professionals face, systemic barriers, and steps we can take to pave the way for a healthier culture. As we wrap up, let's remember that addressing burnout is not just a personal responsibility but a collective endeavor involving healthcare institutions, policymakers, and society at large. ...
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Addiction and Healthcare Providers
The Burnout Antidote: Infusing Well-being into Healthcare Culture
In 2020, forty million people in the United States had a substance use disorder and only 6.5 percent received treatment. Healthcare providers are not immune to substance use disorders and other addictions. Some studies indicate that stress, burnout, exposure to death and trauma, access to prescription medication, and a culture of fear of stigma and loss of license are contributing factors for healthcare providers turning to drugs, alcohol, and other addictions as coping strategies. In this episode, co-hosts Amy Pearlman and Paul Deger discuss the impact of addiction on healthcare...
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The Healing Power of Telling Our Story
The Burnout Antidote: Infusing Well-being into Healthcare Culture
Common humanity, one of the three components of self-compassion, the antidote to burnout, is strengthened by sharing our unique stories. We can build empathy and support the humanity involved in healthcare by honoring and elevating the lived experience of healthcare providers and patients. In this episode, co-hosts Amy and Paul speak to Scott Acord and Michael Drummond from the Providence Institute for Human Caring about Hear Me Now, a patient and provider storytelling project with a goal to make healthcare more humane. For more information about how you can share your story with the...
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Tech in the Healthcare Space
The Burnout Antidote: Infusing Well-being into Healthcare Culture
What are your experiences and feelings toward your healthcare system’s EMR? Love it? Hate it? What about the growth of AI in healthcare? Tech in healthcare has given us incredible advancements that have saved lives. At the same time, the rate at which technology is created and implemented may be outpacing our ability to adjust to the impact on operational systems, policies, and the human beings providing care. In this episode, co-hosts Amy and Paul discuss the intersection of technology, healthcare, and burnout. They explore the impact on culture and work-life integration. We also hear from...
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The Impact and Boundaries of Telehealth
The Burnout Antidote: Infusing Well-being into Healthcare Culture
The urgent and critical need of standing up large scale telehealth capabilities at the beginning of the 2020 COVID epidemic dramatically launched virtual care into our everyday healthcare practices. We saw the benefits and efficiencies for both patient and provider. At the same time, we quickly learned and experienced the pitfalls. In this episode, co-hosts Amy and Paul explore the intersection of burnout and telehealth. What is the best working environment for you - virtual, in-person, hybrid? What do patients prefer? Let’s take ourselves off of “mute” and discuss. Our Hosts: Amy...
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Moral Distress Prevention and Mitigation
The Burnout Antidote: Infusing Well-being into Healthcare Culture
This week’s episode includes a powerful story of the toll burnout can take on us, challenging our perception of our values and who we are. In this episode, we continue our burnout recovery journey by diving even deeper into the concepts and experiences of moral distress and moral injury. Co-hosts Amy and Paul reflect on the story of a clinician who found himself wondering what kind of person and healthcare provider he had become, what led him to that place, and the patient experience that changed his and his patient’s life. Our Hosts: Amy Pearlman, MSW, LICSW Amy...
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Coping with Personal Stressors as a Healthcare Provider
The Burnout Antidote: Infusing Well-being into Healthcare Culture
Life is a series of experiences, good, bad, and otherwise. How do we make it through demanding work responsibilities when we face tough times in our personal lives? In this episode, co-hosts Amy and Paul talk about living in two worlds - our work life and our personal life, and the advantages and disadvantages of compartmentalization. They describe strategies for supporting colleagues and yourself as a healthcare clinician who is also dealing with stress outside of work. Our guests share stories of working while going through difficult times in their life, like a relationship breakup, and...
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Healthcare Clinicians Living with a Disability
The Burnout Antidote: Infusing Well-being into Healthcare Culture
The skipped lunches, extra shifts, completing charting after your workday was supposed to end, fitting in the extra patient - we often go above and beyond to meet the needs of our patients in a stretched healthcare system. But running ourselves into the ground is not helping anyone. In this episode, co-hosts Amy and Paul talk about how to balance care delivery and taking care of your personal health when you have a chronic health condition. Our guest recalls her experience with the onset of a health condition and how she learned to advocate for her needs so that she could be healthy and...
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Experiencing a Mental Illness as a Healthcare Provider
The Burnout Antidote: Infusing Well-being into Healthcare Culture
One in five U.S. adults experience a mental health condition each year.* What happens when the healer is also healing? As a healthcare clinician, do you feel like you have the space, resources, and support to take care of your own mental health? In this episode, co-hosts Amy and Paul discuss the experiences of healthcare clinicians who have a mental health condition, associated stigma, seeking help, and integrating our identities as healers and humans. Our guests discuss their experiences as healthcare providers with depression and anxiety. Content notice: This episode contains...
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Secondary Trauma as a Healthcare Provider
The Burnout Antidote: Infusing Well-being into Healthcare Culture
Healthcare providers can both experience trauma while providing care and they can also be exposed to secondary trauma, or hearing about the direct traumatic experiences of another person. In this episode, co-hosts Amy and Paul define primary and secondary trauma, common responses to trauma, and how colleagues and healthcare leaders can build support for clinicians that experience trauma while delivering care. Our clinician guest describes their experience with treating a complex medical presentation that led to a patient’s death and the impact that it had on him. Content notice: This...
info_outlineOur healthcare community is hurting. Recent surveys indicate that 38% of healthcare workers report anxiety and depression, 43% experience work overload, 49% report burnout, and 1 in 10 medical students report feeling suicidal ideation. As a healthcare worker, you’ve probably been given a list of self-care tips to help you be more resilient. We’re challenging the healthcare system to think about this differently. How do we make changes in the healthcare environment and culture, and also protect ourselves from suffering burnout?
Welcome to The Burnout Antidote podcast, where we honor real stories from healthcare workers who share their experiences with burnout and moral distress in their own words. Our hosts, Amy Pearlman, MSW, LICSW, and Paul Deger, MA, LPC, PT, reflect on these stories, explore tools to cultivate community, and share strategies to create healthier systems that are less likely to induce moral distress. This episode features our special guest, Dr. Thekla Brumder Ross, an expert in burnout, moral distress, and self-compassion, who helps us embark on this journey.
“We just haven't been taught in our culture how to name our suffering, and when we name it, we tame it. We can actually decrease it by getting it out of our bodies, out of our mouths, out of our brains by just saying it out loud. ” - Dr. Thekla Brumder Ross
Meet the Hosts and Experts:
Amy Pearlman, MSW, LICSW
Amy Pearlman is a quintessential social worker with a strong desire to improve healthcare outcomes. She believes that the best way to support the largest number of people is through engaging the community of providers and allies. She has transitioned between provider and payer settings over the course of her career to develop her clinical skills and maximize her empathy of provider experience, with the mission of aligning perspectives around a shared focus and goal to improve healthcare for individuals and families. Her clinical expertise is in crisis intervention, community based care, and clinical program design. Amy believes that healthcare is strongly tied to the health of care providers and is proud to support the healthcare system in this way.
Paul Deger, MA, LPC, PT
Paul Deger is a mindfulness-based intervention specialist. He has been in the healthcare delivery world for 35 years - first as a physical therapist, then as a licensed professional counselor. Paul has worked in a broad range of healthcare environments - inpatient, outpatient, ER and home-based. He also has served as a trainer for health care providers - covering clinical and self-care topics. Paul has seen - and experienced provider burnout - and has found sustainable ways forward. A life-long learner, he seeks out ways to exemplify being human and professional, accessing head and heart, balancing self-care and caring for others. To learn more about Paul, click here.
Thekla Brumder Ross, PsyD
Thekla Brumder Ross, PsyD is a clinical psychologist, a certified ambassador of compassion, a national leader of addiction medicine, a workforce wellbeing consultant and she strengthens human resources for abortion providers. In her 14 years at Kaiser Permanente, Thekla led large-scale dissemination, implementation, and sustainability of evidence-based practices and policies in addiction medicine, SBIRT and primary care behavioral health integration. Notably, she developed the Kaiser Permanente National Harm Reduction Strategy and acted as a subject matter expert in patient activation and provider wellbeing. Today you can find Thekla acting as a strategic advisor to NIAAA, serving on the National Drug Abuse Treatment Clinical Trials Network Community Representative Council, providing guidance to organizations in product, content, and strategy design, as well as consulting on the dissemination and implementation of evidenced based care in health systems. To learn more about Thekla, click here.
Resource:
Dr. Kristen Neff’s Self-Compassion Quiz
The Burnout Antidote is a co-production from Psych Hub and is brought to you by Janssen Neuroscience.
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