Work-life balance is when a person can rise above the conflict and align their responsibilities with their values and priorities, says Maria Bailey, founder and CEO of BlueSuitMom.com, a Pompano Beach, Fla.-based company that provides work-life balance information for professional working mothers and their employers.
“It is being satisfied with one’s entire life, with the work side as well as with the personal side,” Grimm says.
It makes sense to take care of your people. First, it’s the right thing to do. Second, it’s financially and fiscally a good move. It’s not just work-life balance for the sake of work-life balance; it’s critically important to your operations and your overall success in delivering good care.
—Janet Nagamine, RN, MD, SFHM, Kaiser Permanente Medical Center, Santa Clara, Calif., SHM board member
Young physicians of both genders view work-life balance as essential, and are willing to risk career advancement to achieve it, according to a 2006 survey of U.S. doctors under age 50 conducted by the Association of American Medical Colleges and the American Medical Association.1 When asked to rate factors that are very important to a desirable position, 71% identified work-life balance. Two out of 3 young physicians said they were not interested in working longer hours for more money—a sharp contrast from previous generations.
“It started in the 1990s, but I think in the early 2000s was when the medical world began to take a much more honest appraisal of the long-term impact of an unbalanced life and what that meant for physicians,” says Erin Stucky Fisher, MD, MHM, medical director for quality at Rady Children’s Hospital San Diego, associate program director for the University of California at San Diego Pediatric Residency Program, and an SHM board member.
Dr. Nagamine agrees the tide has shifted in terms of physician attitudes toward work hours, compensation, and personal time. “Now that we have work-hour rules in residency, the doctors coming out don’t buy that you have to be on 24/7, 365 days a year,” she says.
The Survey Says…
Recent research on hospitalist work-life satisfaction indicates that while hospitalists generally are satisfied with their job and specialty, burnout rates appear higher than the 13% previously reported in 2001.2
Earlier this year, a study in the Journal of General Internal Medicine found that 29.9% of respondents to a national survey of hospitalists reported job burnout symptoms.3 Hospitalists surveyed also reported low satisfaction with personal time (28.3%), autonomy (17.4%), organizational climate (10.7%), and organizational fairness (31.2%). The results are somewhat alarming to longtime hospitalists, in that hospitalist work models might be less flexible and less sustainable than originally thought.
Results from an email survey published in 2011 showed that 67% of academic hospitalists reported high levels of stress, and 23% described some level of burnout.4 Additionally, 57% of the respondents had 20% or less of protected time for scholarly activity—a disconnect between career goals and actual work that could lead to career dissatisfaction. More than half of the academic hospitalists surveyed, however, did express high or somewhat high satisfaction with personal and family time, and control over work schedules.
“Hospital medicine is still a new field, and people are trying to find the right balance in the work,” says Rebecca Harrison, MD, associate professor of medicine and section chief of the division of hospital medicine at Oregon Health & Science University in Portland. “I think we’re in a very critical time now where we have to look at scheduling, patient load, fulfillment factors. A physician’s sense of commitment, happiness, and enjoyment in their work is going to be much higher if you pay attention to the things they want to pursue.”