A military combat-medicine program deploys mental-health teams to protect doctors and nurses. The speaker tried bringing this model to civilian hospitals during COVID but hit a wall: hospitals won't fund it without insurance reimbursement, even though it saves money long-term. The fix requires clinicians to speak up about burnout so leaders will finally listen.
Chapters
One of the things that I learned in the US military, and they learned this through Afghanistan and Iraq, that the amount of stress that their doctors and nurses had to deal with, with combat medicine, that they realized that the rate of burnout and unhealthy ways of dealing with stress was too high, so they developed entire teams of mental health professionals who deploy not for the patients, but for the doctors and the nurses. That's literally their job, is to protect the mental health of the doctors and nurses. That's their entire job. And when COVID happened, I called up the Surgeon General of the Air Force. I said, "Hey, you know those mental health units that you have? What are they doing now?" They said, "Nothing, because we're not deployed." I said, "Can we deploy them domestically?" I was like, can we send them to our hospitals to look after our doctors and nurses? And there's a whole rigmarole and they're not legally allowed to, blah, blah, blah. But then I started asking the question is, why don't hospitals have mental health professionals that are there for the doctors and nurses? That's their sole job. And we know the answer. It's because it costs money. And if I can't bill it to the insurance or to the state, then I'm not gonna spend the money. What the leaders of hospitals don't understand is it's going to cost you way more in the long term than this thing in the short term. So I think one of the things we have to start doing, and I'll do my part if you do your part, is we have to talk about it. We have to make that which is implicit explicit. We have to have doctors and nurses to have the courage to say, I'm struggling. I don't have the strength for this pace, and I know nobody else does. Because all it takes is one person to say it, and then you get sort of like one other person goes, "Me too," you know? But nobody will unless somebody goes first. And so I can tell the stories about these needs for these units, and they exist, and there's models, and we can copy the models, we don't even have to start from scratch. But I also need people to say, "We need help." And it starts with one.
