Medicine has a crisis it can’t ignore for much longer. Speaking from personal experience, burnout in healthcare professionals is a very real and very serious problem.

Studies consistently show that approx. 40 % of doctors report significant burnout symptoms at any given time with 18% classified as high risk. And this was even before the pandemic which sent a worsening problem into a crisis with the highest reported figures for burnout reported in 2022.

Burnout is not a character weakness, nor does it show a lack of resilience. Often it can be caused by a lot of stress coupled with long hours. Under resourcing, poor sleep and a lack of work/life balance can also contribute. But in my experience more often than not burnout happens due to occupational exposure, often trauma, with little to no support.

I’ve watched colleagues burnout from both inside and outside the NHS. In fact, burnout is widespread across many wakes of professional life. Lawyers, teachers, social workers, financiers, these high-responsibility roles coupled with an emotional load creates a perfect storm. But medicine sits in a category of its own.

Despite years of training at medical school, clinicians carry the weight of clinical decisions and patient suffering which no amount of training can prepare you for. There can also be a lot of institutional pressure within medicine and a lot of expectation around service and self-sacrifice. Asking for help can feel extremely difficult and many don’t. Until they can’t function.

And patients suffer too. Burnout causes errors, according to the BMJ, doctors experiencing burnout are twice as likely to be involved in patient safety incidents and receive low satisfaction ratings. More and more healthcare professionals are choosing to leave our profession despite years of study, hard work and sacrifice.

Of course I am calling for change. Most of my posts call for change, but I truly believe a more sustainable model of healthcare would help fix what is both a structural and cultural problem within medicine. Protected time for healthcare professionals is needed alongside peer support and psychological safety provisions. And to protect our resources we need to invest more in different types of medicine, shift the focus from reactive to proactive, tackle prevention and health inequalities and give individuals the tools to manage their own health.