TheJakartaPost
Please Update your browser
Your browser is out of date, and may not be compatible with our website. A list of the most popular web browsers can be found below.
Just click on the icons to get to the download page.
Low awareness of burnout among medics
World Health Organization experts define burnout simply as a “state of vital exhaustion”.
Change Size
The Medscape Lifestyle Reports 2017 conducted among over 14,000 physicians in the United States showed an increasing trend of burnout prevalence, reaching up to 51 percent — a 25 percent increase compared to 2013. (Shutterstock/Alexxndr)
W
orld Mental Health Day was commemorated worldwide on Oct. 10, yet it brings a pang in my chest whenever I think about the health of medical professionals like myself. As medical professionals we are expected to be at our top-most performance every day.
This makes our well-being much overlooked; we drain our bodies with long hours, prolonged sleep deprivation, irregular meals, inadequate physical activity and constant exposure to various infections. Mental health itself feels like another realm to most medical professionals, and our unawareness of it is glaring. We brush aside any emotional discomfort to spare us stigma or even bullying from our colleagues. We cannot show any signs of weakness because we do not want to be considered inadequate and left behind in this race.
World Health Organization experts define burnout simply as a “state of vital exhaustion”. Burnout has recently been widely discussed as people scrutinized the toxic working environment of medical residents. The Medscape Lifestyle Reports 2017 conducted among over 14,000 physicians in the United States showed an increasing trend of burnout prevalence, reaching up to 51 percent — a 25 percent increase compared to 2013. Similar figures are absent for Indonesia so far. But having spent 12 years of my life in the medical field, I have encountered more people (not including my patients) experiencing burnout and various mental health issues compared to friends in non-medical fields.
Burnout can arise from many factors; it is the accumulation of daily pressure from overwhelming tasks and moral distress. Working 36 hours straight is exhausting, physically and mentally. You are expected to do a lot of writing, walking, explaining, examining, thinking and a lot of texting. Apart from physical fatigue, you also use up emotional “storage” in adjusting to different patients with different backgrounds, complaints and expectations. Imagine meeting 30 clients back-to-back in a day. That is how it feels to work in a polyclinic, plus making life-and-death decisions in the emergency room. This insurmountable pressure and workload on a daily basis is silently taking its toll on us.
