Featuring Diane Shannon & Paul DeChant
This week, in the second of our series about physician burnout, our guests focus on solutions. Diane Shannon and Paul DeChant, both physicians, join us to talk about their recent book Preventing Physician Burnout, Curing the Chaos and Returning Joy to the Practice of Medicine.
Diane and Paul talk about their experiences with burnout and how they came to work on this project together, how they contend that organizational and structural factors are more important than individual factors in driving burnout, how compensation and intangible rewards can reduce burnout, how leadership in healthcare can address the epidemic of burnout. We also talk about how they have come to believe that the LEAN principles, most especially the pillar of respect for people, is key in transforming healthcare organizations into places where primary care physicians can thrive, why change is so difficult, and some other resources that can help.
Diane Shannon is a general internist who left clinical medicine due to burnout and turned to a career in medical writing and public health. Paul DeChant is a family physician and experienced healthcare executive who has previously worked in organizations such as The Paulo Alto Medical Foundation, Sutter Gould Medical Foundation, and is now a senior advisor with Simpler Healthcare.
If you’ve missed it, have a listen to the first in our burnout series with Colin West, researcher at Mayo Clinic who has done foundational research on burnout and physician well-being. Please rate and review us on itunes, google play, or stitcher, which makes the show easier for others to find; and share us on social media. We tweet at @rospodcast and are on facebook at www.facebook.com/reviewofsystems. Please drop us a line at contact@rospod.org. We’d love to hear from you, and thanks for listening.