@WUSTL_EM #EMConf: #FOAMed Supplement No. 3

This week we had a combined conference with our neighboring residency at St. Louis University to discuss the important topic of wellness in emergency medicine.  The line-up included talks on sleep,  physician burnout, the impaired physician, second-victim syndrome, and a board panel of attendings to discuss their own "tricks of the trade".  Unlike sexier topics such as critical care, I was able to find a lot less on these topics in the FOAMed world.  While "wellness" may be more nebulous, it remains extremely important not only to our quality of life as physicians, but also to the quality of care we provide to our patients.

1. The Importance of Sleep.
The TED series has a number of talks on sleep.   Russell Foster, a neuroscientist, gave this talk on Why do we sleep?

2. Physican Burnout & The Impaired Physician.
There has been a fair amount of attention to the risk of suicide amongst physician in the public media. The article, Why Do Doctors Commit Suicide?  published in the NY Times draws attention to importance of peer support in physician coping.

For EM-specific resources, emdocs produces the EM Mindset series, which is written by EM physicians and describes our specific practice of medicine.  It has a lot to offer the young EM physician. Some posts in this series touch directly on mechanisms for resilience, including:
            James Adams:  Frameworks & Habits of an EP
            Rob Orman :  The Successful EM Mindset
            Steve Carroll: Masters of the Undifferentiated Patient
           
Finally, you can also read this article that was discussed during today's lecture on factors contributing to "burnout" during EM residency.

3. The Second Victim: The TED series has a number of talks that focus on humanizing the physician and discussing medical errors.  Brian Goldman's talk, entitled Doctors Make Mistakes, Can we Talk about that? is particularly well done.

4. Advice from Others:  Check out the How I Work Smarter series from ALiEM.
My particular favorite?  Rob Rogers' post,  because of this great advice which I have taken to heart:

                    ' Someday when you are sitting on your front porch in a rocking chair
                      thinking about the “good ole days” you aren’t going to have thoughts
                      of “I wish I had written one more paper or traveled for one more lecture."'

Enjoy ... or maybe take a nap instead. #ChooseWellness

 Maia
@maiadorsett