Work/life balance is a critical stasis for staving off stress and preventing burnout down the road. With more physicians than ever reporting depression, burnout, and unbearable stress levels, doctors are leaving medicine in record numbers. Whether you're just feeling the effects of stress or you're on the verge of collapse, you must get help handling the load.
While most physicians can benefit from talking to a licensed professional about their stress, there are things you can do to improve your work/life balance on your own. While this won't completely stop the process of moving toward burnout, it can help invigorate your passion for medicine. By incorporating these strategies along with stress reduction techniques and possibly therapy, you can get back to living the life you love.
Why is physician stress so overwhelming?
Many doctors have an overload of patients, even before COVID-19 was a global pandemic. With the stress of the pandemic, most physicians have found themselves overworked, and with a loss of staff, they're often usually doing administrative work as well. When you have an office to run on top of the overload of medicine you're accountable to, it can feel like drowning.
Right now, getting staff, supplies, and referrals can be a complicated, frustrating process that you shouldn't have to handle on your own. Working twelve or more hours a day can make it seem like things will never get better without some form of assistance. These strategies can help get you started on achieving a more balanced work/life state:
1. Organize your office
The first thing you can do is organize your office. If you are doing the work of office personnel and attending to your clients, a disorganized office can be a significant time sink. So you'll have to sacrifice time somewhere else — self-care, family life, or hobbies. Achieving a better balance means reconsidering your time and recapturing it for yourself. Taking one afternoon to organize and clean up your office can be hours back later doing what you love.
2. You cannot have time unless you take time
Starting with how you spend your time is a great way to be aware of how much power you have in your life. You can exercise, get quality sleep, spend time with your family, and have fulfilling hobbies. It just requires that you lay a foundation that allows for these things.
If you have an overload of patients, consider hiring another doctor for your practice. Additionally, partnering with a telehealth platform like ViTel can help extend your reach for hiring and patient care, billing, and intake.
Having a fully-staffed clinic can give you more freedom to focus on your patients and yourself.
3. Find hobbies that make you happy
Exercise is a great way to relieve stress, but so are hobbies that engage your mind and body. Golf might be a cliché doctor's hobby, but it's a great way to get exercise, and it's a great skill to hone. Anything that helps get you out of the mindset of work can help you relax, like creating art, hiking, or yoga.
4. Set boundaries
If you're finding yourself working longer and longer days, skipping lunch, and not making time for yourself, you need to start saying "no." Carving out time for yourself is critical to ensuring you don't get overstressed. Start with setting boundaries: take your lunch, stop working at five, limit social media, and arrange a work schedule that fits your life.
5. Consider what telehealth can bring to your practice
Many doctors have increased their revenue streams by adding telehealth to their established practices. With that said, telehealth also allows you the freedom to work hours that better fit your desired work/life balance. Partnering with a telehealth platform like ViTel also enables you to recruit more doctors to help relieve some overburden.
ViTel offers a variety of telehealth solutions that can help you staff your clinic and find more doctors to care for patients. ViTel's AI-learning patient intake process makes gathering diagnostic information easier and faster, allowing you to focus more on listening to your patients.
Additionally, we make credentialing new physicians a snap with electronic digital verification that is more accurate and faster than traditional credentialing methods. Patient billing and record-keeping are streamlined with our administrative software, giving you more time to focus on medicine.
Improving work/life balance can bring everything back into focus
Making more time for yourself is the first step toward getting your stress levels down. Set boundaries, and get help if your work is overwhelming. This process can be as simple as hiring more staff or working with more physicians to lessen the load.
Consider what a robust telehealth platform like ViTel can bring to your daily practice. From making routine billing and HIPAA-compliant record-keeping easier to filling referrals and connecting with other physicians, ViTel can help make your practice work enter on all fronts.
More efficiency, less administrative overhead, and better connections can all work together to help you regain control of your work and life, improving both for the betterment of the other. Contact us today to see how ViTel can be a part of that process.
