Osmosis’ Top 3 Tips to Avoid Burnout

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The life of a healthcare student, whether they’re in a medical, nursing, PA, dental, or pharmacy program, is stressful at the best of times. Whether you’re on your way to becoming a health professional, or already on the job, it’s important to be aware of the signs of burnout. Osmosis is here to provide tips to help you find balance before burnout becomes an issue.

How do you describe burnout?

Burnout is a physical, mental, and emotional collapse. It ‘s more than the result of long hours worked, it’s also the stress associated with that work. Exhaustion leads to a lack of interest, and, potentially, a decline in job performance. Left unchecked, burnout can wreak havoc on more than one aspect of your life. Here are some tips to avoid burnout.

Tip 1: Use Hacks

Make sure that you’re using hacks, or tricks, to save time. There are a lot of hacks to get around the bureaucracy of medicine.

You’ll encounter this at lots of hospitals: paperwork. Save time on paperwork! Some hospitals may help you out with this by providing a medical scribe, someone else who writes the notes for you. It’s not always an option, though, so a suggested alternative is to make a template. Take your notes and then have templates set up for each chief complaint on your computer (i.e. a template for taking notes regarding chest pain, abdominal pain, asthma, etc.) Having those templates set up ahead of time helps you fill out the paperwork easily and it also helps in triggering your memory to ask certain questions when talking to the patient.

(Side tip: most residents on the floor have their preferred template. If you ask nicely, they might share it with you!)

Another hack is to bundle your work. Meaning you should group similar tasks together. Manage all of your notes at once, do all your discharges at once, do pharmacy runs all at once. Think about what tasks are on your to-do list and which ones can be done together to save time.

Tip 2: Set Boundaries

We’re talking personal boundaries. This includes setting up a time when you should plan to leave the hospital every day, making sure everything is all set before you leave, and then making it a hard stop. Practice setting a firm time as if you had to be somewhere each time or you need to leave to get to an event. Don’t linger. Creating very firm limits about when you arrive at the hospital/facility and when you leave really helps a lot with burnout and stress levels. You have something to look forward to and you won’t always be at the hospital.

Tip 3: Establish a Healthy Work-Life Balance

Having a solid work-life (or school-life) balance is challenging with such a busy schedule and it’s often your social life that suffers.

While you might be rolling your eyes at the advice, “managing your work-life balance” is as simple as reading for thirty minutes a day from a favorite book or taking a dance break listening to your favorite artist. Try to always do a “favorite thing” to relieve stress rather than risk frustration and the possibility of taking it out on someone else.

Balance is based on choosing little things that make you happy and save your sanity. Long walk outside, talking to friends, making a habit of calling friends or family after a stressful shift all attribute to maintaining your work-life balance. Creating little habits to have something to look forward to can help avoid burnout.

(Side tip: do something you enjoy first thing in the morning to start the day off on a good note!)

Signs You May Be Experiencing Burnout

Preventing and addressing burnout is becoming a part of the workplace conversation in most industries, however, we also need to listen to ourselves and address the signs of burnout. Forbes describes 10 signs of burnout, and in addition to our suggestions, offers some ways to address it.

Alright, a Quick Recap

The three tips for avoiding burnout include:

Use hacks.
Set boundaries.
Establish a work-life balance.

Taking care of yourself helps you to better take care of your patients. Check out this blog if you want to read more on how to improve your lifestyle to avoid burnout!