Dr Mark Friedberg on Achieving Professional Satisfaction in the Practice

In the last few years, there’s been a real surge in interest in professional satisfaction in healthcare, according to Mark Friedberg, MD, MPP, senior natural scientist and director of the Boston office at RAND Corporation.

Transcript

What larger initiatives are in place to address physician satisfaction and what do they hope to achieve?

In terms of large initiatives, in the last few years there’s been a real surge in interest in professional satisfaction in clinicians, physicians, and other types of clinicians as well. The American Medical Association, for example, has some efforts in place that are freely available to physician practices around the country. And these are general ideas on how to restructure in your practice to make it more durable basically.

There are also some what I call symptomatic treatments that have become popular like mindfulness training and other things that sort of like treat the symptom but not the cause. So like bringing tea or snacks around to people to make them feel appreciated in the practice. I do worry about that second category of popular approaches to professional satisfaction. The ones that are like mindfulness and the tea and you know appreciation letters. Those might be a cover up of underlying problems and you might be able to get a little bit of improvement in professional satisfaction without addressing any of the underlying issues and I do worry that that wouldn’t be a very good approach for people to take if on the other hand they could be addressing some underlying issues and getting a bump in professional satisfaction instead.