Suffering from administrative distress?

Fight back against paperwork-induced burnout

"I adore seeing patients, but what will drive me out of family practice eventually is the paperwork."

Sound familiar? If you spend hours each day filling out paperwork for which there’s no billing code, and if you spend your evenings and weekends completing form after endless form, and it's driving you up the wall — well, you're not alone. Recently, a team of Saskatchewan researchers set out to measure just how bad the problem has become.

In a study published In March's Canadian Journal of Psychiatry, psychiatrist David Keegan and researchers Rein Lepnurm and Wallace Lockhart measured what they called the "daily distress" of doctors. They asked physicians across the country about their professional and personal lives: anger at colleagues, frustration with demanding patients, ability to sleep soundly, whether work responsibilities interfered with home lives, etc.

The study's results (PDF) were, well, deeply distressing. According to their measures, slightly more than 50% of doctors experience very serious distress several times a month; another 37% are in distress at least once a week.

Read the rest of this article, from the June issue of Parkhurst Exchange, online here.

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