By Jennifer Abbasi, JAMA Network, May 20, 2020
In the spring of 2013, Eileen Barrett, MD, MPH, lost a colleague to suicide. The two worked at the Indian Health Service’s Gallup Indian Medical Center in New Mexico, where Barrett was the deputy chief of medicine. Even before the tragic event, she saw workers struggle under administrative burdens and hold themselves personally responsible for problems outside of their control.
With her coworker’s death it became painfully clear that clinician wellness had to become a higher priority. “It made me really think that we needed to do more for everybody on the health care team,” Barrett, now an associate professor of medicine and an academic hospitalist at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, said in a recent interview with JAMA.
As the school’s director of graduate medical education wellness initiatives, Barrett has spent a lot of time focusing on physician care since the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic began. She wants physicians to remember what she learned in Sierra Leone during a 6-week stint as an Ebola health worker in 2014. Surrounded by the very real risk of death, she realized that she’d be of no help to anyone if she herself fell ill. In fact, forgoing her own physical or emotional health could jeopardize her patients and fellow health workers.
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