Leaders of the SVS Wellness Task Force urge all SVS members to complete a new survey on physician burnout, this one aimed at physical debility.
The burnout survey is in an email from the Mayo Clinic, which is assisting with distribution and tabulation. It is the second survey the task force has distributed, all aimed at ascertaining burnout and wellness statistics from SVS members.
“We need evidence,” said Malachi Sheahan, MD, who is vice chair of the group with Dawn Coleman, MD. As chair. “We can’t make change without evidence.”
He issued a “Societal Call to Action” to SVS members at the end of a session at the Vascular Annual Meeting addressing burnout issues.
Dr. Sheahan disclosed statistics from the first task force survey, completed by 860 members. Collectively, members worked an average 73.5 hours a week, with five hours completing electronic medical records and 5.5 hours of administrative/scholarly activities added to 63 hours in the office.
“Eighty-nine percent feel burned out on occasion, everyone thinks they’re working too hard and when there are conflicts between work and personal life, they’re resolved in favor of the personal side only 8 percent of the time,” he said of the recently released data.
He believes EMR will be the No. 1 conflict of vascular surgeons, with surgeons reporting they spend one hour charting for every one hour of patient time. “It’s just not working out,” he said of the records system.
Twenty percent of physician respondents said they had been sued for malpractice within the past two years, 37 percent reported being depressed within the month prior to completing the survey and the 8 percent who reported suicide ideation within the past year is double the national rate, Dr. Sheahan said.
The second survey, launched in mid-June, focuses on physical debility as a result of the stress on the body vascular surgeons face and should take fewer than 10 minutes to complete. It is expected to close in late summer.
“Look for the Mayo Clinic survey, and please take it,” he said. He added that there are initiatives going forward that aim to change the environment and change the culture. These include the SVS task force and the American Board of Surgery’s new lifelong learning initiative. “This is a call to action,” Dr. Sheahan said. “The main thing I want to say is that this is changeable. I don’t want you to think or say that we can’t do it. We can. We just need evidence.”