Given the context, that's exactly what your comment implies. That because you assume that hospitals won't do anything to change the current state of affairs we shouldn't study it more.
Hospitals wont do anything to reform for the simple reason that all of medicine today in America is a business, and business does not operate out of a compassionate, moral or caring paradigm. Physicians and patients both need to reboot their memory, and clear the old cache from how medicine was practiced decades ago. Hospitals respond to government regulations, accrediting bodies and payer reimbursement formulas. Nothing else. Physician suicides? NIMBY is their response.
Any large organization, particularly of a non-charitable bent, will do that which is in the best interest to itself, particularly shareholders. There was a time in America when businesses also included stakeholders in their metrics formula. Stakeholders (e.g. employees, Residents, Fellows) are no longer part of the metrics of businesses today. Our current economy is an
employer dominated market.
Employees are just widgets to businesses (including hospitals).
Consider our current USA economy and the labor market. Think of the millions and millions of Americans who are employed at retail big box businesses, and yet are underemployed, over qualified, receive meager wagers and most of whom take these jobs because they need health insurance. This “business first” trend has been in existence since circa 2008. Extrapolate from this trend the outrage you rightly have and yet the lip service that teaching hospitals give. Physician suicides for them are blips in the big scope of things. Precisely because suicides fall under mental health, businesses will see the victim as having “issues”....outliers. The onus is not on them because the victims are “mental” especially since their colleagues can keep their wits about themselves. So the business concludes the suicide was something not caused by their business operation since clearly scores of physicians within one hospital are not following suit. Again, its a metrics thing one devoid of the priorities you / I have in our lives: compassion.
Whatever you and I think “should” occur because of these suicides does not square with an “ought” or “ontology” (i.e. Rene Descartes). There is no ontology in America today. The nature of becoming, being, a priori reasoning within the context of the universe, are not part of our national fabric. We have in our nation a
dictatorship of relativism. The notion of an “us” and a “moral imperative” are no where on the collective psyche of America today
In my homeland we had a saying that my mother would often say. It was quite simple but profound: “somos tu y yo” (we are you and me). In America it is “tu o yo” (you or me).
E pluribus unum?
Nope.
Your Christianity is your /my / our answer. Sprinkle seeds of Faith where we work but keep in mind that our generation is a very lost one.
Physician suicides are our new normal. American businesses yawn. Predictable.