Opinion | Don’t Spend $103 Million on Health Worker Burnout …

Last week, the federal government announced an initiative to spend $103 million to help address healthcare worker burnout.

While at first glance this might seem like just what the doctor ordered, I worry that this is applying a Band-Aid to a hemorrhaging patient. There have been many programs rolled out in this arena lately, locally and more globally, and thus far most have not proved all that effective.

The past 2 years have taken an enormous toll on healthcare providers, from doctors to nurses to respiratory therapists to social workers, to every member of the team trying to take care of our patients, whether those patients have COVID-19 or not. We’ve seen the depths of despair reflected in medical writing and on social media, we hear about it every day, and we see it etched in the faces of our colleagues. And it has been manifesting in more and more ways, from decreased productivity to increased irritability to early retirement to self-medication — and even to suicide.

I guess the government offering a large chunk of money cannot be seen as a bad thing, but I worry that it’s not really addressing what’s going on, nor is it likely to be able to make that much of a difference.

Over the past 2 years of this terrible pandemic, we’ve seen efforts at wellness promotion range from free food to coupons for yoga and meditation classes. Unfortunately, these do very little to address the many underlying problems, and are often seen by those of us working on the front lines as paying lip service, to the point of almost being insulting.

Recommendations to exercise, eat healthy, get plenty of sleep, and seek mental healthcare when we need it are, while sound advice, often impractical. During times of war — and war this has been — telling people to duck their heads seems less than helpful.

I know this may not be the best way to think of it, but if we divided the proposed $103 million by all of the healthcare workers who have been affected by the pandemic, it would probably work out to just a couple of bucks each. More than 4 million registered nurses in the U.S., more than 1 million doctors, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg of those fighting these battles.

This reminds me of programs like “cost savings” plans, where providers are asked all year long to chip in to improve metrics, then at the end of the year the massive savings get watered down and a small amount trickles into your paycheck — when that money be better served by being applied directly to some of the problems that plague our healthcare system.

I know that $103 million may seem like a lot, but for what is needed, it really isn’t much; but what if we multiplied that by 1,000, and applied it to the myriad problems that are making the lives of healthcare workers today — and even our lives before the pandemic — border on the miserable?

Someone once described for me a way to think about the difference between a million dollars and a billion dollars:

If I paid you $1,000 a day, it would take a little less than 3 years before you were a millionaire. But to become a billionaire, if I had started paying you that same $1,000 a day back at Year 0, two thousand and 22 years ago, it would take over 600 more years before you became that billionaire. And yet, somehow there never seems to be a problem finding the billions needed for weapons systems that aren’t making us any healthier.

For years, we have been screaming about all the things that need to be improved in healthcare: eliminating bureaucracy, streamlining the electronic medical record to make it user-friendly for the people taking care of patients, providing equitable access for our patients, improving broadband availability across all our neighborhoods, and removing barriers such as economics for our patients to be able to receive the medications and the care they need no matter which community they live in.

So wherever this $103 million came from, I bet there’s more out there, more that we can find to do things that actually make a difference. Make it so that nurses don’t need to spend most of their working hours clicking in the charts, so they can attend to their patients. Make it so that primary care doctors don’t need to spend hundreds of hours filling out mindless paperwork and churning notes and faxing forms and getting prior authorization from insurance companies. And make it so that our patients can afford their medications — the medications we as their doctors think they need — the minute we say they need them.

So thank you to the federal government for thinking of our wellness, for recognizing that we are burning out and stressed and overwhelmed and at risk. But it’s time to think bigger, time to address the root problems and apply the money where it matters most. Make our lives better, and the lives of our patients better, and we won’t need frozen yogurt and coupons for yoga classes and mindfulness apps quite so much.

Feeling better already.