Doctor burnout: investigation into a global crisis
According to the WHO, the physical and psychological exhaustion of doctors threatens to ‘lead to the collapse of healthcare systems as early as 2028’. Four years from now, or in other words, tomorrow.
The deterioration in the mental wellbeing of healthcare professionals is a worldwide phenomenon. What the WHO is describing is not a sudden, violent explosion as with Covid, but the result of a gradual cracking of the system since the 2000s.
So why hasn't this collapse made the headlines? Why hasn't it prompted health ministers to get together as quickly as possible and take action? Is this a case of denial, similar to that of global warming? Are we going to wait for decades to listen to the whistleblowers? Are we once again going to postpone any recognition of the urgency of the situation?
According to the WHO, the main cause of burnout amongst medical practitioners is the shortage of staff: there will be a shortfall of 230,000 doctors in Europe by 2028.
How did we get here? Why does this shortage exist, particularly in Europe, the most advanced continent in terms of health care? Why haven't we anticipated the massive ageing of the population, or taken into account the emergence of new behavioural disorders, in order to adapt the number of doctors to our needs? Why didn't we train more doctors when the retirement of the baby boomers was largely foreseeable?
The answers most often given to these questions are budgetary. For health service managers, doctors are becoming an adjustment variable, and the discrepancy between the justified expectations of patients and the demands of an ever more rigid system is increasing doctors’ unease and plunging them into an existential crisis: overwork, accumulated stress, the risk of false diagnoses, back-to-back shifts, loss of meaning for a profession that is very often a vocation... By exposing the extent of the malaise among European doctors, this film reveals the deep-rooted causes of this burn-out ‘epidemic’ and the threats it represents for our healthcare systems.
If fewer people choose to study medicine, if more doctors leave the profession, if our societies can no longer afford to train and pay them, who will look after us in the future?
