Introduction: Burnout has become a focus of concern in healthcare delivery. An estimated 50% of all physicians suffer from symptoms of burnout. This is true for up to 60% of practicing neurosurgeons. Our busy neurosurgery team is no exception. We have discussed or deployed a whole series of strategies to counter the development of burnout on our team. We are interested in learning which strategies seem to be taking root and are being normalized by our team mates.
Methods: For the past 4 years, our team has participated in monthly 2-4 hour resilience building sessions, supported by a renown expert in physician wellness and physician burnout. All members of our neurosurgical provider team have been involved. This includes faculty surgeons (9), residents (7), and advanced care practitioners (11). We have identified, discussed, and/or deployed up to 50 strategies to help build resilience. We subsequently questioned and surveyed the group reference which strategies they felt were particularly effective, most employable, most desirable, least practical, etc.
Results: 50 resilience building activities/strategies were identified and evaluated. We identified the 10 felt to be most effective and employable. Not all effective measures were felt to be practical. For example, we tried to initiate a 2 hour midday break once a week for all providers. Uniformly the team noted that they loved the idea but it proved to be impossible to sustain.
Conclusions: We identified multiple resilience strategies and activities that were felt to be helpful and deployable by the majority of the team. We also identified multiple activities that were desirable but felt to be impractical for a busy neurosurgery service (without addition of FTE’s). These observations may be very useful to programs testing the waters of resilience and wellness building in their teams- particularly when trying to generate a resilience curriculum.
Patient Care: burnout has been demonstrated to adversely affect patient care. Methods that reduce burnout and build provider wellness will help overall quality of care and decrease medical errors.
Learning Objectives: understand which resilience-building strategies might besot practical and most deployable for a busy neurosurgery team of providers.