Thankful Thursday: Healthcare Providers

It’s Thankful Thursday and I’m sending a note of gratitude to our healthcare providers.

I recently spoke with a doctor about physician burnout. She’s a general practitioner and her calendar is way beyond full. She’s scheduling appointments with her regular patients 7 months out. How do I know? She’s my doctor.

She entered the room for my appointment in a swirl of energy, sat down and started putting notes into my electronic records file. While attentive, and with a great memory of my last visit, she appeared to be “on the clock”. When I asked her how was she doing, she replied, “You’ve heard of physician burnout, yes? Well, a lot of physicians are experiencing that and they have pulled back to half time schedules leaving a lot of us to pick up the slack.”

She went on to share how the pandemic affected her and the anticipation of a winter surge. She and her entire staff remain masked since early 2020. I felt her anxiety, veiled by humor and a sense of responsibility to her patients.

The challenges of creating a compassionate healing environment are also complicated by the nursing shortage, a growing aging population, increasing service delivery costs and incredibly complex healthcare insurance plans.

I come from a family of healthcare professionals. My father was a physical therapist; my mother was a registered nurse and hospital executive; my brother is a retired physician and hospital executive; and my cousin is a physician. I have great admiration for those who chose a life of saving lives and have seen in real-time the burdens of that chosen life.

Thank you to our healthcare providers – physicians, nurses, chiropractors, dentists, physician assistants, pharmacists, mental health practitioners, physical and occupational therapists, and more – who along with their staffs attend to things unseen by patients while simultaneously caring for each of us as we come through their doors. We see you.