Managing Stress and Burnout, and Achieving Wellness, in Physicians and their Patients: Understanding the Triggers and Acquiring Skills for Prevention and Treatment

Physicians, nurses and support staff have numerous roles and responsibilities which facilitate patient care, satisfaction, and adherence. The presence of expanding technologies, notably electronic medical records, have put increasing demands on expertise as well as taking far more time. This makes it challenging to meet the important aspect of patient-centered care. Patients today can be difficult to manage, demanding, and often quote inaccurate information gleamed online. In addition, test results need to be presented in a timely manner while simultaneously requiring empathic skills when delivering bad news. While treatment advances have increased survival rates for many patients, explaining complex treatment regimens and the potential costs is time consuming and stressful.

With the recent WHO acknowledgement of burnout as a disease, more attention is being paid to the physical and psychological demands of being a healthcare professional. Physicians and nurses report increasing levels of job dissatisfaction, physical symptoms such as insomnia, headaches, fatigue, back and neck pain and gastrointestinal distress, and psychological symptoms such as anxiety, irritability, and depression.

This course will offer a comprehensive combination of educational and training strategies as well as numerous experiential exercises to combat stress, prevent and treat burnout, and improve not only participant wellness but also lead to an improvement in patient care. Strategies will include relaxation training, cognitive approaches to combat automatic negative thought patterns, mindfulness training, empathic skills communication, and methods to combat perfectionistic thinking patterns.

For example, mindfulness has been shown to be an effective antidote and it is possible to incorporate mindfulness into one’s daily routine in a practical and efficient manner. Practicing mindfulness can ease the consequences of stress while simultaneously improving patient care.

In addition, perfectionism is common and even encouraged in the medical world. Acceptance to medical school is predicated on academic excellence and thus, in medicine where teamwork, appropriate social behavior, and flexibility may be as important as academic knowledge, this can feel threatening for the physician who has succeeded through perfectionistic academic self-induced pressure. Committing a mistake, although expected by all in this field, can feel overwhelming and unacceptable to a perfectionist and can lead to symptoms of stress, depression, and even suicide. Solutions to maladaptive perfectionism include cognitive-behavior therapy an d coaching which will be emphasized.

Topics:

1. How to Communicate with Difficult Patients
   • Apply techniques to manage difficult patients encountered in clinical practices focusing on empathic skills communication
2. Providing a Patient-Centered Care Experience
   • Give examples of the concepts of patient-centered care and the strategies which emphasize them
3. Counseling Issues for Delivering Good and Bad News
   • Develop and improve clinician skills when discussing test results with patients, with an emphasis on appropriate delivery of bad news
4. Utilizing Emphatic Communication with Patients
   • Cite the research on empathic communication and methods of delivery
5. Managing Patient Expectations
   • Identify techniques to improve overall patient care and delivery
6. Models of Practice and Counseling Interventions
   • Describe the most effective counseling interventions
7. Recognizing Symptoms of Burnout
   • List the physical, psychological and behavioral symptoms of burnout
8. Integrating Mindfulness into One's Daily Life
   • Be able to initiate a personal mindfulness practice and have the skills to explain mindfulness to patients
9. Recognizing and Combating Perfectionism
10. Hands on Experiential Exercises in Cognitive-Behavioral Approaches