I hear it almost every week, and it usually comes out sideways. They start by telling me they are done with medicine, that they cannot do this any more, that they have nothing left. Then we slow down and look at what is actually draining them, and it is rarely the patient in front of…
If you are still in healthcare after everything the past few years have asked of you, it isn’t because you failed to leave — it’s because some part of you still believes the work matters.
Years ago I found a safety rule buried in a hospital’s patient-record system that was protecting almost everyone in the building — and quietly endangering the sickest patients in it.
I watched my mother lose everything she had worked for — her money, her career, her pension six months from the finish line. She was behind bars, her trial wrapping up the way everyone feared it would, and I was the one left to walk her bankruptcy through the courts from the outside. Her whole…