Resident physician stress and
Resident physician stress andResident Physician Stress and Burnout
Resident physicians are in the most stressful stage of their medical career. Normal stress may increase to the point where it becomes abnormal stress, which is thought to achieve a critical level at some point. This abnormal stress level can then lead to burnout; burnout can lead to impairment. Both professional and personal stresses make huge demands on the resident's time. Unfortunately, there are only 24 hours in a day, and as a resident physician that day includes very little, or no, free time. Learning medicine at this level requires a greater level of involvement in patient care and responsibility.
The daily actions of ordering medication, following outcomes of tests and communicating with patients and their families all fall upon the resident. The resident is still supervised by the attending physician. As during medical school, residents must learn to manage enormous amounts of information, new research, treatment protocols and processes of medical practice. This requires a great deal of study-time, as well as time in lecture, discussion groups, and journal clubs in order to learn their specialties.
An additional demand occurs in residency. Residents become teachers for peers, attending physicians, and medical students. The reasoning is that teaching often educates the teacher better than books or lectures. In many programs, residents provide substantial portions of medical student education during student's clinical years. Residents serve as on-site physicians, sometimes spending nights in the hospital "on call" for routine and emergency situations and for the admission and stabilization of patients. Traditionally, an on call assignment lasted about thirty-six consecutive hours in the hospital, and it was common for the resident to get little sleep. Things are slowly changing, and today's residents tend to have slightly shorter on call hours. Overall, a typical resident spends up to eighty hours a week in the hospital. Time away from the hospital must be divided between learning and personal interests.
During this time residents receive a stipend of about $28,000 to $30,000 dollars per year, an amount which increases slightly each year in the residency program. Debt is a considerable
problem for residents. The debt among University of Colorado Health Science Center residents was anywhere from $65,000 to $130,000. All of these loans to be repaid create stressful budgeting problems for young physicians.
Managing their personal lives becomes very difficult. A June 1997 issue of Cortland Forum an article by Dr. Xenakis titled "Top Physicians Not Always Best Husbands and Dads" he notes: A major magazine annually lists top-rated physicians in the country. Generally, these are based on physician peer ratings and supplemented with information from patient surveys and physician-treatment patterns. While most physicians look forward to reading their names in the list, those not impressed with the survey are the physicians' spouses. "We pay the price," said the non-physician...
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