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I hope to be able to burn out by my early 50s. 🙂
Seriously though, I've said it before and I'll say it again. The secret to preventing burnout is to work less. 8 hours shifts. <2 patients per hour. Less than 15 shifts a month.
How many burned out EPs were working 10 or fewer 8 hour shifts? I'd bet very few. Don't minimize the difficulty of working rotating shifts in a stressful environment where you never know what's coming through the door, people routinely lie to you, and you're constantly interrupted. This is not an easy job.
Learn to live on $200K and have a great life and a wonderful career.
P.S. I'd be burned out doing anything for 30+ years.
I hope to be able to burn out by my early 50s. 🙂
Seriously though, I've said it before and I'll say it again. The secret to preventing burnout is to work less. 8 hours shifts. <2 patients per hour. Less than 15 shifts a month.
How many burned out EPs were working 10 or fewer 8 hour shifts? I'd bet very few. Don't minimize the difficulty of working rotating shifts in a stressful environment where you never know what's coming through the door, people routinely lie to you, and you're constantly interrupted. This is not an easy job.
Learn to live on $200K and have a great life and a wonderful career.
P.S. I'd be burned out doing anything for 30+ years.
Can't make even close 200k for 10- 8 hour shifts where I live Active... and I am not in a big city or particularly desirable place either. Can't even make close to 200k for 15 - 8 hour shifts.
I hear ya... There's some academic places where you can buy down your time and do 8 x 8's a month (or less). Not likely to be < 2 pts pph regularly, though. And of course, those jobs are very hard to come by and the academic committments are far greater than the clinical ones, which may not suit many people. I guess there's no real ideal job that's also financially viable.
The thing that most leads to burnout in my mind is not only toxic shifts, but increasing proportion of toxic patients. I'll work plenty of 12's even at 3 pph with 1/3 of them needing MICU, if the patients weren't manipulative, drug-seeking, abusive, gorked-out *******s. And on the flip side, if they're at least educated and "manly" enough not to ask me to "numb up" their skin for putting steristrips on an already closed lac. Unfortunately, there's few places in this country where patients a) are predominantly nice and b) medically educated to a decent level. It's the combination of an increasing toxic population + toxic shifts that
What's really funny is that we have the same staff that rotates through 2 sites, one site has excellent PG scores and the other site has dismal PG scores. That right there highlights the inaccuracy and variability in PG scores.
We work at 3 different sites with different populations. Our PGs are reported as 3 separate scores. One month I'll be at 99 percentile at one place and 20 percentile at another. Makes no sense whatsoever.
It makes perfect sense - your PG score is totally unrelated to the care you provide.
If you're an ass than it correlates well, otherwise it's almost completely tied to length of stay and how nice your nurses are to the patient. There was a nurse that was new to triage who didn't radiate compassion, every pt she triaged that got a PG survey rated everyone significantly lower than they usually scored. It basically takes one poor part of the encounter to toss your scores down into the dumpster. Shops with good PG scores tend to be extremely authoritarian, since even minor deviations in perceived courtesy will drop you out of the vaunted 90% or even 75% percentile.
Perhaps in an attempt to be punchy I came across as an ass above, if so I apologize. I'm not trying to be argumentative - I agree with GV & Leorl. What I'm trying to say is that for the majority of docs PG scores do not reflect courtesy or quality of care - they reflect wait times and length of stay.
I can say that our hourly is far less than that. We re in las Vegas. Its a large CMG so we do loose some to the "corp"
I suppose the benefits are good.
What part I the country you in Active?
Reno?
That sounds like good stuff!
Jealous 🙂
I looked at jobs in Reno, and found a group I really liked there, but they weren't hiring the year I needed a job. Try the other road out of town. 🙂
8 hours shifts. <2 patients per hour. Less than 15 shifts a month.
Employee of "big corporate group" in Florida. $175/hr plus benefits. 2 pts/hour by yourself for sure... and then you have to oversee the midlevels. I like my job.
There's two things that I want to add here:
ActiveDuty's ideal holds up.... as long as you don't have crushing student debt. I pay on the north side of 5K/month OUT in debt. Then there's all the other expenses, etc.
Also, I have found my own "grand folly". I used to think that I would enjoy face-time with patients and educating them as to what's gone wrong and how they can be involved in their care. Now, (only six weeks in), please.... please give me the critical care patients so I don't need to hear whining about how they're dissatisfied with X-Y-and Z and how there wasn't a chocolate on their pillow when the nurse wheeled them to their room.
It really says something about the field when I'm brand-spanking-fresh-new to the attending-world and I already feel this way. Don't get me wrong: I walked in to the hospital early today, walked up to the ICU, and hugged the guy that I resusc'ed two nights ago that was extubated, off of his pressors, and giving me two thumbs up, saying "thank you".
He had an emergency. Emergency Medical Services brought him to the Emergency Room for Emergency Care.
The rest of the folks...
I find these studies and the attending's responses who have been out working for several years to be immensely valuable. Basically... this is a second career for me and I'll graduate at 38 next year. I sometimes wonder about the burnout issue and how it should affect my decision on what type of practice environment to look for as my first job. At the moment, I feel pretty energetic and positive but I sometime wonder what I'll feel like 10 years from now or 20. I had a candid discussion with a locums physician who is probably around 60 and had worked in every ED environment imaginable. We were working in different ED's that weekend for the same company and he had an amazing amount of insight into how to avoid burnout. We must have talked for about an hour outside our hotel rooms and he had some great advice. I've never considered it a threat, but studies like this worry me sometimes when my gut instinct is to look for level 1&2, high acuity ED's to work in my first year out. Maybe I should be looking for a less stressful environment, but I enjoy the challenge.... at the moment.
Do you guys think you first job outside of residency should be a significant challenge or not?
I had a candid discussion with a locums physician who is probably around 60 and had worked in every ED environment imaginable. We were working in different ED's that weekend for the same company and he had an amazing amount of insight into how to avoid burnout. We must have talked for about an hour outside our hotel rooms and he had some great advice.