In This Episode: The medical profession is starting to realize that it’s been missing a very important element of patient care. It’s likely that you’ll be very surprised to hear what it is, but then when you think about it, it’ll make total sense — and you’ll be mad that you didn’t get it.

073: The Missing Element

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Show Notes

*

* The story about Rosaura Quinteros, who helped save Col. Jason Denney, which brought me to this subject.

* Dr. Trzeciak’s TEDx talk is embedded in the transcript.

Transcript

Welcome to Uncommon Sense. I’m Randy Cassingham.

What’s the biggest problem in healthcare today? I mean in the actual practice of healthcare, not the cost or doctor shortages, but what medical professionals do on the job. I suspect most healthcare providers would probably say “burnout” — they have too much to do, too much paperwork, too much administrative duties, and thanks to that doctor shortage, a never-ending line of patients needing care, but they’re so busy there’s never enough time to provide all the care that’s needed.

Enter Dr. Stephen Trzeciak. He’s not just a professor of medicine at Rowan University in Camden, New Jersey, he’s the Chairman and Chief of Medicine at Cooper University Hospital. He’s board certified in internal medicine, emergency medicine, critical care, and neurocritical care, all particularly heavy-hitting specialties. He works as an intensivist — the doctor who treats patients in intensive care. People only get admitted to the ICU when they’re critically sick or injured, so he has to be able to deal with it when, despite all his efforts, many of his patients die anyway.

So it’s probably no surprise that with all of that, he was burned out.

Trzeciak says that the typical “treatment” for burnout is to get away for awhile — detatch from the job, go on vacation. He said he felt intuitively that detachment was probably the wrong thing to do. He probably noticed that detachment didn’t help him, and didn’t do much for his colleagues, either.

Meanwhile, he says, we are “in the midst of a compassion crisis.” He’s not talking about sympathy or empathy: he says scientists define compassion as “an emotional response to another’s pain or suffering involving an authentic desire to help.” Sympathy and empathy are “the understanding components,” but compassion involves taking action.

Dr. Trzeciak tells the story of a 2007 highway crash in Sweden: two buses collided head-on. Amazingly, only six people were killed; 56 were saved. Researchers followed up with those 56 people five years later to ask what they specifically remembered of their ordeal. Two things stood out as their strongest memories. The first thing, no surprise: pain. The second thing: a lack of compassion from the people who cared for the...

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