How have you seen burnout manifest in ICU settings?

Question

Lakshman Swamy · Answer

Burnout is unfortunately really common for all health care workers and particularly common in the intensive care unit. And the easiest way to say how I've seen it manifest is in people leaving, leaving the ICU and leaving clinical practice altogether. This is especially true with nurses. We're having, you know, growing nursing shortages across the country, especially in the ICU. So I think burnout is unfortunately, you know, it's due to the conditions in which we work as well as the nature of the work itself sometimes and kind of the emotional toll of being in the ICU. But it can result in people outright leaving and before that it result, you know, the best sort of meme I ever saw was a vending machine that had a sign on it said that said the light is broken but I still work. And that's what it feels like, right? Your empathy tank is dry, you feel like the work you're doing doesn't matter and you're really disconnected from your sense of who you are. None of that is a good way to be when you are, you know, trying to take care of very sick patients and be there in their moment when they're the most vulnerable. And I think we feel that. We feel like we are letting ourselves and our patients down when we're very burned out. So it's unfortunately all too common and we see the effects of it kind of every day. And I think what's really scary is when people try to treat it, not by just fixing the symptoms and all this and not by going to therapy, which is probably really important too, but by for example drinking a lot.

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"How have you seen burnout manifest in ICU settings?"