On Monday at the University of Nevada, Reno, the Nevada Physician Wellness Coalition held a meeting about mental health with local medical workers.
During the meeting, they brought in hospital leaders from northern Nevada to talk about physician well-being and burnout.
Colleen Camenisch, the Executive Director of NPWC, says physicians have extremely high rates of burnout.
She says, pre-pandemic, the burnout rate was about 45% and increased tremendously through the pandemic, and unfortunately, those numbers stayed high even after the pandemic.
"So, if people want providers and want providers to be well, it's really important that we look at this topic," she said.
She also said physicians die by suicide at high rates all across Nevada and that women physicians die at higher rates than men.
"What we'll focus on today are the systemic issues that contribute to that," she said. "I think patients feel that too when you have a really rushed appointment or when physicians are doing a lot of computer typing when you're meeting with them, so we want to help reduce administrative burdens that physicians have and increase the connection they have with their patients in a way that they can serve them and make sure they're staying well in the process."
Last year, they found that a lot of physicians felt they could not seek mental health care for themselves because of the stigma that surrounds the topic.
They also say it's hard for physicians to admit when they are struggling, so they resort to struggling in silence.
"So, some of the goals for the meeting today are trying to see, with the hospital systems and the physicians themselves, what their priority areas are, where they are really struggling, what's new this year that we haven't looked at previously, and how our organization can support them in that," she said.
Camenisch also says they have statewide working groups of chief medical officers where they address different issues at a hospital and state level.
"We have a huge shortage of medical physicians in Nevada," she said. "It's a big problem. It's always been a problem, and we see physicians are retiring at really high rates and leaving practice at really high rates, so everybody should care about this if they want to have a physician they can see and they can see in a timely way."
Camenisch tells us they also plan to have more meetings with physicians so they can have a safe space to talk about these topics as well.
