Let’s face it, at any one time doctors have to deal with a wide assortment of different cases that adds a lot of work to their already tight schedules. As such, AAFP states that they need all the help that they can get otherwise they will burn themselves out in no time which doesn’t help them, the hospital or the patients they care for. It is based on this that this article focuses on the different ways that hospitals can help in preventing their doctors from burning out.

HIRE MORE DOCTORS

One of the main reasons why doctors burn out in hospitals is simply because they have been overworked. While it is true that hospitals do have the right to cut expenses whenever they can, they should not do so at the expense of their current doctor’s welfare. As such, it is highly recommended that hospitals at least consider hiring more doctors when it is evident that they are dealing with more patients that they can feasibly handle.

HIRE A TRANSCRIPTION COMPANY

Aside from hiring more doctors, The Happy MD states that it is also advisable that they hire a transcription company to help with the sheer amount of transcriptions that doctors have to deal with on a daily basis. Based on the findings from Time.com, it was noted that doctors spend more than two hours a day simply filling out all the necessary transcriptions of their patients. In fact, they often leave this for the last part of the day resulting in them having to put in even more overtime simply for the transcriptions alone. It is based on this that a hospital should consider hiring companies such as Eyered Transcription for work such as urology transcription so that they give their doctors more time to rest.

UTILIZE ELECTRONIC MEDICAL RECORDS

The role of electronic medical records at the present is that they act as a replacement for the current manual filing and recording system utilized by hospitals and medical institutions. They enable doctors and medical practitioners alike to immediately pull up a patient’s medical history and treatment procedures in a way that results in a more rapid and efficient method of medical treatment. As such, electronic medicals records can be considered an effective means of efficiently and effectively sharing patient data with doctors and medical practitioners.

The problem with having to deal with physical medical records is that it can take up a considerable amount of tim1e just looking for them. While this can be considered as a relatively minor inconvenience, it should be noted that this adds into the time it takes for doctors to properly screen and diagnoses their patients and, as such, having electronic medical records can help considerably in eliminating this sort of problem thereby making the jobs of doctors a lot easier.

CREATE BETTER CLINICAL SUPPORT SYSTEMS

The inherent problem with clinical support systems at the present is that even though they improve the performance of nurses and doctors, there is still a distinct difficulty in workflow integration. For example, studies examining the use of clinical support systems have shown that on average there was a tendency in various cases to focus on the functional decision making the core of clinical support systems which inadvertently caused a deficiency in planning how a doctor or nurse would actually use the system. Not only that, clinical support systems are often standalone systems which require employees to stop what they are doing on one system in order to shift to the clinical support system which in effect breaks the workflow and from the doctor’s or nurse’s perspective actually causes more time needed for the research and input to be done.

Another problem with these systems are numerous warnings that keep on appearing which doctors have learned to ignore due to the sheer amount; however, some of the warnings are, in fact, necessary, this causes problems not only for the doctor but also for the patient who may have an allergic reaction to the medication yet the doctor ignored the warning due to irritation. It is due to a combination of these factors that clinical support systems have been in decline over the years. One suggested a method of resolving this could come by fixing the system to make it integrate with other hospital systems and make it far more user-friendly. While yes this can be considered as a large investment by the hospital, it would go a long way towards making the job of doctor’s that much easier.

Given that the current variances in the way in which healthcare is applied in different states as well as the fact that some hospitals at the present simply do not have the funding necessary to implement the changes advocated for in this article, it is understandable that such improvements won’t be seen in some time. However, if hospitals truly want to prevent their doctors from burning out, they should at least consider some of the proposed changes.