Your head hurts; your muscles ache. You’re noticing your shoulders tense all the time and you find yourself constantly trying to relax your neck muscles. The past six months, you know you have not been eating your normal healthy way of eating. It’s a vicious cycle with no end in sight.
Sound familiar? It has been a few months since that last long weekend or vacation for you. Often, when I start to feel this way, I find that I’m no good to anyone else around me. Meaning, my brain shuts down, I get the flu, and my typical creative and entrepreneurial self has lost its luster.
I have been an administrator of a private clinical practice group, have had oversight of both internal and surgical residency programs and a large department for a cancer research center and have seen physician leaders, scientists and faculty showing signs of exhaustion and burnout.
As an administrator, I think it is our responsibility to ensure that our physicians have the work-life balance that the rest of us are able to achieve. I think we have taken our physicians for granted to be there at our beck and call and fix us when we’re sick; work ridiculous amounts of hours because we have been concerned with the bottom line, fiscally speaking. We forget that without our physicians, there will be no bottom line to worry about in the first place and there will be no physicians left to do the critical work of treating the sick because we have run them to the ground.
In the past few years, there has been tremendous amounts of research reported on higher numbers of suicide and burnout rates in physicians. I think we’re finally starting to take notice, or at least, physicians are taking notice. Administrators on the other hand, have not taken the initiatives to design programs to heal our healers.
Now that I’ve hung up my organizational administrator-ship, I’ve decided with other business partners, to design new models of programs to which our physicians, across all the disciplines have the opportunity to enjoy a well-deserved break and combining it with learning new behaviors that is also accredited to meet some much needed continuing education credits.
In HealthyMD-CME, that’s exactly what we’ve implemented. For eight days straight, you cruise onboard a luxury riverboat; you are pampered with daily exercise routines (from yoga to cycling or do your own workouts), gourmet and nutritional cuisine, and cultural touring experiences at every port. Your 5-star cabins follow you wherever you go and the freedom to choose whether you go on the planned tours or go out on your own. You meet amazing people from the same profession and not have to worry about trying to collaborate on a research or share case studies. If you do, wonderful for you, but it’s not a requirement!
The CME portion of the program is short; no more than one and a half hours per day and will be held during meal breaks or while sailing and our key educators are physician themselves and are passionate about healthy and happy physicians. For example, on our upcoming Rhone River Cruise in Southern France, November 2020, we will have Dr. Hassan Tetteh, Chief Thoracic Surgeon for the US Dept of Navy who has experienced firs-hand burnout while in active duty and post. Information about HealthyMD-CME can be found on our website at healthymdcme.com.
Let’s make our physicians healthy by designing and implementing programs that is sustainable. Stress is not allowed.
