Happy Labor Day 2021

 

This is my annual Labor Day greeting to my physician colleagues. I had to go back and look at last year’s greeting to see if I had factored in the pandemic or not.  It appears at the time that I was fairly enthusiastic about telepsychiatry and its applications during the pandemic. Ironically, I will be giving a presentation on telepsychiatry later this year and in reviewing a fairly massive amount of information my initial enthusiasm has been tempered. Although it appears to have had a semi-permanent effect on the regulatory environment there are still unanswered questions about its optimal applications. How it will be used by the business community is also unknown at this point.

One of the articles I reviewed in New York Magazine - outlined a pattern of questionable business practices at least as it was applied to therapists. Direct interviews with therapists suggested that they were being exploited by being paid much less than their going rate with the expectation that they would be more available after hours and by texting. Preliminary surveys indicate that there are psychiatric clinics popping up looking for psychiatrists to staff telepsychiatry visits. There are many unknowns about their practice. In another article, some employers were asking therapists to see people outside of the state they were licensed and hope that the regulatory environment would catch up with the employment practice. Those are not good signs for the labor environment.

I noticed in my 2020 post that I had an initial drawing of how the practice environment had changed and now that drawing has been expanded and includes many more details. It captures most of what I have endured as employed psychiatrist. I include a graphic below and hope that as physicians we can reverse the trend at some point.

The pandemic has clearly been demoralizing for physicians in general but much more for frontline acute care physicians responsible for COVID-19 patients and their frontline colleagues in nursing and hospital support. There has been a shortage of personal protective equipment (PPE), beds, adequate ventilation, and supportive services. There have been deaths and resignations compounding the personnel problem. As the staffing ratios worsen - the emotional stress is at an all-time high. Local disasters compound the COVID crises in many areas.  All the descriptions I see indicated that the healthcare system will end up permanently altered by this pandemic and probably not in a positive way. There seems to be no effort to incorporate a public health approach into the current subsidized business rationing approach that dominates American healthcare. That is not only detrimental to physicians and their coworkers but also the public health infrastructure in general.

A new dimension to the demoralization has been the misinformation industry associated with the pandemic. Physicians trying to provide information in good faith have been attacked and even threatened by some of the zealots associated with or affected by that misinformation. That includes some of the top experts in the world who have been active in research and teaching immunology, epidemiology, virology, and vaccine production. Physicians are given the message that is up to them to communicate to the zealots and convince them that the pandemic is real, it is a really a virus, and that immunizations are the best approach. There appears to be no convincing a large group of people that wearing masks may reduce viral transmission even though that practice was widespread in the 1918 epidemic in the US and is currently widespread in many parts of the world. Physicians are getting the message that they have to magically find a way to communicate with this group of people who have rejected all of the usual channels.

It seems obvious to me that physicians are the only group that are excluded from empathic communication. The expectation is that physicians will be all-knowing, all understanding, and that somehow will correct most of the anti-vaccine, anti-science, anti-expert, and anti-COVID sentiment out there. I think that is a fairly naïve approach and what physicians need is concrete help from politicians, community leaders, and regulators.  Social media is gradually coming around but has responded at a glacial rate. 

I also notice in my greeting from last year that I commented on an APA Presidential Task Force on Assessment of Psychiatric Bed Needs in the US.  I saw no further action and that and was not able to find it in a search. That potential bright spot maybe on hold due to the pandemic, a lot also depends on the conclusions if they are available.

Progress against the burnout industry has been maintained but it is clearly a war of attrition. Physicians in general reject the idea that burnout is due to some inherent personal deficiency and are more likely to see it as the real product of an unrealistic work environment. In many cases that unrealistic work environment has increased many-fold due to the pandemic and all of the associated problems. I hear from physicians every day who are able to exercise minimal self-care due to overwork and limited time away from work. Weight gain is common due to unhealthy diet and no time for exercise. A solution for some has been to leave those work setting behind even if it means early retirement or taking an undetermined period of time off. Many physicians who could easily have worked into their early to mid-70s are retiring at age 65.

Employers seem to be doubling down in this adverse environment. I quit my last job in January 2021. Since then, I have been actively looking for new positions. There has been a recurrent pattern of highly leveraged job descriptions, that I would accept only if I really needed employment. By highly leveraged I mean that the job description contains anywhere from 20 to 30 bullet points, the majority of which have nothing to do with being a clinical psychiatrist. To cite one example, many of the applications describe a “leadership role” where the really is none. No organization that I am aware of wants a frontline clinical psychiatrist to attempt to correct their obvious administrative problems. I received a cold call one day from a recruiter who asked me if I was interested in a “very good” inpatient position. I asked him what the productivity expectations were and he said I have the options of seeing 18 or 22 patients per day. He quoted a disproportionately greater premium for seeing 22 patients a day. He seemed convinced that I would accept the position until I asked him “When am I supposed to live or sleep?” I had the thankless job of covering inpatient unit of 20 patients for an entire year with the help of an excellent physician assistant and that almost killed me.

The unrealistic expectations being placed on physicians are still out there and they are as bad as they ever have been. It is why I used a heavy lifting graphic for this post again. Despite the pandemic the business leverage against physicians is not letting up and that is not a good sign. To make matters worse, there always seems to be room for it in the medical literature. The latest example I can think of is a recent essay in the New England Journal of Medicine claiming that digital healthcare fee-for-service payments are unsustainable and there must be a capitated system. That seems to be part of the master plan to continue a rationed-for-profit system that guarantees over-employment of bureaucrats and business managers as well as corporate profits at the cost of treating physicians like highly paid laborers as depicted in the above diagram.

I don’t think physicians will have any reason to celebrate Labor Day, until that rationed- for-profit system is dismantled.  Until then do what you need to do to take care of yourself and survive. Help from professional organizations would be useful, but there are too many conflicts of interest for that to be realized.  I am still hopeful that we can get back to the stimulating clinical environment of the 1980s, but I will be the first to admit - there is no obvious path back in the face of a trillion dollar healthcare rationing business - largely invented by Congress.

 George Dawson, MD, DFAPA

 

Graphic Credit:

Robert Yarnall Richie, No restrictions, via Wikimedia Commons. "Workers Adjusting Tracks, Texas Gulf Sulfur Company."