Interview with Dr. Simon Maltais

This week’s guest explains why you must put yourself first in order to overcome burnout and “Healthcare Disease.” He is a successful academic cardiac surgeon who fell victim to both of those conditions. However, he overcame them and wrote a book to assist others to do the same. 

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Dr. Simon Maltais recently released “Healthcare Anonymous: Put Yourself First to Avoid Anxiety, Addiction and Burnout.” It addresses the root causes of burnout and other dysfunctional aspects of our health system in which most of us have worked. 

Simon is an active cardiac surgeon in one of the world’s largest healthcare services institutions. He is an internationally recognized leader in the field of heart failure and alternative cardiac interventions. He is also a keynote speaker, author of more than 160 articles, and book contributor.

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Healthcare Anonymous: Put Yourself First to Avoid Anxiety, Addiction, and Burnout

Dr. Simon Maltais started writing through journaling. And he held conversations with dozens of experts on the issues leading so many healthcare workers to stress, anxiety, burnout, depression, and addiction. In turn, this system leads to devastating personal and professional consequences for healthcare workers, patients, and society. 

This book offers a guide for healthcare workers to understand these challenges and start a process of healing and recovery.  It is intended as a way to start a movement to address these challenges. It is available through all of the usual channels. And it can be purchased directly from Dr. Maltais’s website here.

Highlights from the Book

  1. Characteristics and personality traits. Ego, perfectionism, self-discipline, and other traits often found in healthcare workers, and that are nurtured further during training, set us up for healthcare disease.
  2. The influence of the environment and the system. Long hours, little time to rest and recover, and prolonged self-sacrifice in the name of the patient, keep us from identifying early signs of stress and burnout. and more. There are also unrealistic expectations by the public. 
  3. The way we interact with the system. Healthcare workers cope in ways that further interfere with balance in our lives.

Dr. Simon describes the development of healthcare disease as a process, that develops similarly to other diseases. It involves the agent, the host, and the environment.

Simon’s Advice

“For physicians, especially certain types of physicians and especially the heart surgeon, being honest about having a problem, being honest about being at the end of the rope is hard. And taking a pause is even harder because taking a pause from what?…

“But I give tricks and pitfalls there on what I did in terms of removing some of the extra stuff that didn’t align with where I was with my values. Basically, what you do there is you start creating time for yourself to think about those things.

“It’s creating this extra space and then you have to let things go, and control your schedule.

“Once you get into that recovery, start analyzing every day, because it’s like you’re diabetic and you work in a chocolate factory, or you’re an alcoholic and you work in a liquor store… You’ve got to find a way to protect yourself.”

Summary

The pain that physicians, nurses, and others in healthcare have been enduring is an epidemic and it is destroying careers and hurting patients. Healthcare workers are leaving their work in droves. Patients are unhappy because the system doesn’t work for them either.

Dr. Simon’s book starts another conversation intended to open our eyes to the problem, and help push for solutions. 

NOTE: Look below for a transcript of today’s episode.

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