Stress, Burnout, Resilience

Question 1

what drives burnout and what are symptoms?

Answer 1

• what drives burnout?
  
  • excessive workload
  • inefficient environment, inadequate support
  • loss of autonomy/flexibility
  • problems with work-life integration
• symptoms:
  
  • depersonalization
  • emotional exhaustion
  • loss of meaning or enjoyment

Question 2

what does burnout lead to?

Answer 2

• decreases physicians’ professionalism and the quality of medical care they provide
• increases medical errors and malpractice rates
• lowers patient compliance and satisfaction with medical care
• increases rates of physician substance abuse, suicide and intent to leave practice

Question 3

define psychological stress

Answer 3

unacknowledged painful emotions: fear, anger, sadness, etc.

Question 4

describe the short term vs. long term effect of stress

Answer 4

• short term: adaptive changes that help us respond to stress by mobilizing energy
• long term: corticotropins and toxic to organs, including the brain

Question 5

describe the formula for resilience

Answer 5

• self correction + emotion regulation
• other variables:
  
  • cognitive strengths
  • cognitive humility
  • perceived support
  • ability to self-correct and self-regulate in the presence of aversive stimuli

Question 6

describe mature vs. immature empathy

Answer 6

• immature: sharing similar experiences, gushing, unsolicited fix-it advice, pity, humor as a distraction, poorly-based reassurance
• mature: that must be….you seem….I’m sorry that…..I can imagine that…..Tell me more….

Question 7

describe the availability heuristic

Answer 7

• the tendency to overestimate the likelihood of events that have been encountered recently and are fresh in memory
  
  • treating 6 homeless pts for secondary infxn due to drug use:
    
    • all homeless person use injection drugs

Question 8

describe base rate fallacy

Answer 8

• the tendency to ignore rate information while focusing on specific information
  
  • 21 year old male presents with hallucinations; is he schizophrenic (1 in 100 chances) or on psychedelics (15 in 100 chance)?

Question 9

describe framing effect

Answer 9

• how information is framed:
  
  • describing treatment options in terms of survival rate (people choose riskier option) vs. mortality rate (they choose conservative option)

Question 10

describe confirmation bias (verification bias)

Answer 10

• the tendency to search for, interpret, focus on, and remember information that corresponds with one’s pre-existing beliefs
  
  • we favor (and even manipulate) information: conspiracy theorists, for instance
  • election politics

Question 11

describe representativeness heuristics

Answer 11

• relying on past experiences to decide about new ones

Question 12

describe conjunction fallacy

Answer 12

• the tendency to assume that specific conditions are more probable than general ones
  
  • pt in ER is slurring his words and has not bated in some time > he is drunk and homeless

Question 13

describe Gambler’s fallacy

Answer 13

• the tendency to believe that future probabilities are altered by past events, when in reality they are independent