Can volunteering stave off physician burnout?

It may seem paradoxical, but Dr. Jennifer Yang, a pediatrician, says she feels more energized to practice medicine after spending her Saturday off working at Tzu Chi, a Fresno-Calif., free healthcare clinic run jointly by a Buddhist organization of the same name and unlikely ally Kaiser Permanente.

"It's been such a luxury to sit across from people today and find out a little more about them," Yang told California Healthline about the experience of volunteering at the clinic after seeing four scheduled patients every hour for a week straight at her "real job" at a Kaiser hospital. That same day, a single encounter with a patient and his sister helped Yang's colleague and husband, Dr. Le Ha, a Kaiser oncologist, counteract a week's worth of stress, according to the piece.

Opportunities to volunteer at the clinic, which treats 500 to 600 uninsured patients a month, are in high demand among physicians, most of whom are on the Kaiser staff, said Ivonne Der Terosian, Kaiser's Fresno community benefits manager. "We can all get into our little silos, our individual units and get disconnected from the community. When you face the bigger need outside your own walls you come back to work refreshed, tired sometimes, but refreshed."

It seems that all of us, as humans, stand to benefit from stepping out of our own rut every now and then, if for no other purpose than to see what a real rut looks like.

Dr. Dan Diamond, whom I spoke with a couple weeks ago regarding some Epocrates market research (he's not paid by Epocrates, by the way), also shared some of perspective he'd gained serving as the medical director for triage at the New Orleans Convention Center after Hurricane Katrina as well as heading up medical relief efforts into Haiti following the earthquake earlier this year. "When you strip away everybody's resources and everybody is kind of living on the streets together...they're still able to make a difference," Diamond said. "It comes back to heart issues--reigniting our passion and purpose. [We got into medicine because] we wanted to be able to give."

What do you think? Can more work--even in a slower, perhaps more acutely gratifying environment--help stave off burnout? What other strategies would you recommend for rekindling one's joy in medicine? - Deb