Lauren Sausser | KFF Health News (TNS)
CHARLESTON, S.C. — Melanie Gray Miller, a 30-year-old physician, wiped away tears as she described the isolation she felt after losing a beloved patient.
“It was at the end of a night shift, when it seems like bad things always happen,” said Miller, who is training to become a pediatrician.
The infant had been sick for months in the Medical University of South Carolina’s pediatric intensive care unit and the possibility that he might not improve was obvious, Miller recalled during an April meeting with physicians and hospital administrators. But the suddenness of his death still caught her off guard.
“I have family and friends that I talk to about things,” she said. “But no one truly understands.”
Doctors don’t typically take time to grieve at work. But during that recent meeting, Miller and her colleagues opened up about the insomnia, emotional exhaustion, trauma, and burnout they experienced from their time in the pediatric ICU.
“This is not a normal place,” Grant Goodrich, the hospital system’s director of ethics, said to the group, acknowledging an occupational hazard the industry often downplays. “Most people don’t see kids die.”
The recurring conversation, scheduled for early-career doctors coming off monthlong pediatric ICU rotations, is one way the hospital helps staffers cope with stress, according to Alyssa Rheingold, a licensed clinical psychologist who leads its resiliency program.
“Often the focus is to teach somebody how to do yoga and take a bath,” she said. “That’s not at all what well-being is about.”
Burnout in the health care industry is a widespread problem that long predates the covid-19 pandemic, though the chaos introduced by the coronavirus’s spread made things worse, physicians and psychologists said. Health systems across the country are trying to boost morale and keep clinicians from quitting or retiring early, but the stakes are higher than…
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