In this episode of RadCentral, a radiology podcast, we are joined by Dr. Gregory Charlop, an Atlanta Georgia based Anesthesiologist to discuss his book and work on The Physician Wellness Project.

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Audio Only Version:

Key excerpts:

“Medicine has to evolve and reflect some of the perks and interesting features other jobs have. Radiology in some ways is better positioned to do that then I think nearly every other medical field, because in radiology you have more work from home opportunities.

If I were the head of a radiology program I would figure well how can we accommodate this. How can we make a more fun for our radiologists so they could work from different places or work in different hours or something like that. Let’s embrace technology to support them.

That would make radiology truthfully one of the cooler fields of medicine to go into.”

“There’s lots of nontraditional ways of doing clinical medicine… That’s nice because you control your schedule. You do what you want. So there’s a lot of different ways between per diem, locum tenens, switching groups or renegotiating within your group. But you could solve nearly all these [burnout] problems.”

“At two in the morning, the snacks are vending machine. So it’s me, by myself, in this nearly empty cafeteria, lit by two light bulbs and a vending machine.

And I’m sitting there and I’m thinking, I went through medical school so I could be eating some vending machine food at two in the morning by myself in a cafeteria. I mean, that’s depressing stuff. So there are things hospitals could do to make the nights more attractive. If you figure out a way of having good food, even at night. Ask any doctor – if you have free food that has a big positive effect.”

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Transcript Episode 4: Physician Wellness & Burnout

The transcript has been edited from the video content: Repetitions and vocal disfluencies have been removed for reading clarity.

00;00;00;00 – 00;00;16;15
Dr. Charlop
The runway from the point at which the decision is made that we want to become a doctor, until the point that we’re actually an attending physician is really very long. What ends up happening is that us as 30, 40, 50, 60 year old clinicians are now living with the decision that we made as a 15 year old.

00;00;16;16 – 00;00;19;19
Laura
Welcome to RedCentral a radiology podcast hosted by Excalibur Healthcare. I’m Laura.

00;00;19;19 – 00;00;20;01
Betsy
I’m Betsy.

00;00;20;05 – 00;00;30;29
Laura
And today we are joined by Doctor Gregory Charlop who is an anesthesiologist in Atlanta, Georgia, and the author of the book The Physician Wellness Project. If you’re interested in reading or listening, we’ll link it in the show notes. So welcome, Doctor Charlop. It’s so good to have you.

00;00;31;00 – 00;00;32;06
Dr. Charlop
Thanks for having me on. It’s great to be here.

00;00;32;09 – 00;00;36;25
Laura
Of course. So can you please just introduce yourself really quick to the viewers, your background, who you are, where you come from?

00;00;36;26 – 00;00;55;15
Dr. Charlop
Sure. As you said, I’m Doctor Gregory Charlop, I’m the author of the Physician Wellness Project. And, while I’m a practicing anesthesiologist, I spend a great deal of my time helping other physicians and also other successful professionals with burnout, lifestyle design, wellness, that sort of thing. And I’m pleased to be here today because unfortunately, it turns out that radiologists have a fairly high rate of burnout.

And so I think it’s important that you’re discussing these topics.

00;00;56;25 – 00;01;12;05
Laura
That’s wonderful. So on your website you state that you started the Physician Wellness project because you were feeling overwhelmed and worn out and you were just tired in your clinical practice. Can you speak a little bit more about your personal experience with burnout? At what point did you realize, like, enough is enough, I need to do something.

I need to make a change. What led you to make these changes to get where you are now?

00;01;12;06 – 00;02;35;20
Dr. Charlop
Yeah, I spent many years working at a large tertiary hospital in California, and I think maybe, I guess 6 or 7 years ago, I had, you could call it a mid-career crisis if you want to use that term. And I realized that, I mean, I had all the usual stuff. I really didn’t like being on call. I didn’t like being forced to work over nights and holidays.

It didn’t like the long and unpredictable hours, but I think maybe the thing that really pushed me over the edge was Halloween. Oddly enough, I have two relatively young kids, and I remember, you know, Halloween came and I’ve always liked Halloween, but I couldn’t get it off. And I remember they were just so cute. They were dressed in their little costumes.

My two daughters, they had their little costumes on and they were going out. And I knew about this because I got pictures of it because I wasn’t able to go with them trick or treating. And this is back at a time that they were really excited about it and would have really liked to have gone with me and to have me dress up with them.

But I missed it, and I missed it because I was at work and I and I was very frustrated by that. And I think that kind of set off this long cascade of soul searching, like, what am I doing? Am I missing what’s important, which is time with my family and kids when they actually want to be with me.

Right? Am I setting my life up in such a way that I’m actually harming my health and getting dissatisfied? And so I think that was that was a really a big catalyst for me. That and also reading a few books, you know, as physicians, we’re around other driven people. And so we’re around other people that have gone through more or less the same sorts of things that we have.

You know, they’ve worked hard in high school and in college and throughout the whole process. And so you almost take that as being normal. It’s a normal part of life to do that. And I read The Four Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss, which is an awesome book. Not medical at all, but oddly enough, reading that book gave me permission to say, well, you know, maybe we don’t need to follow this path just because that is sort of the normal path.

We could try to go and do our own thing and do what makes sense for us. And that was really kind of eye opening for me.

00;02;35;25 – 00;02;44;16
Laura
Yeah. So it’s this lack of work life balance that got you. And it’s so prevalent today. There’s a lot of people who talk about this work and life balance. You’re missing your kid’s Halloween, right? You’re missing their winter concert, stuff like that. It’s really.

00;02;44;16 – 00;02;44;21
Betsy
It’s universal.

00;02;44;21 – 00;02;45;18
Laura
It’s universal.

00;02;45;19 – 00;02;47;19
Betsy
Universal. Yeah. It’s whole. Yes. To be with your children.

00;02;47;20 – 00;02;54;11
Laura
So I love that you mentioned, you know, you’re on this path to do something. So in your book, there’s this metaphor for the long runway. Could you please explain to our listeners what that is?

00;02;54;12 – 00;04;03;02
Dr. Charlop
Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, the problem is that within medicine, most of us who are doctors, we decided that we wanted to be a doctor. And though aged 15, 16, something like that. I mean, some people may have decided older or some people knew when they were three, you know, but most of us decided as teenagers. And as a result of the decision, we were on this path.

That’s a very long path. Well, we had to work hard in high school because we knew we need to get into a good college, and then we’d have to work hard in college because we knew we wanted to get into medical school. Then we had to work hard in medical school because we wanted to get into residency, and we had to work hard in residency because maybe we wanted a fellowship, or we wanted to get that plum job in the city where we wanted to live.

And so the runway, from the point at which the decision is made that we want to become a doctor until the point that we’re actually an attending physician is really very long. And so what ends up happening is that us as 30, 40, 50, 60 year old clinicians are now living with the decision that we made as a 15 year old, or maybe in some precocious people’s cases, as a three year old.

And so if you think about it, we may live till we’re 90, 100 years old. Who knows? And if that’s the case, we’ll probably work at least until we’re in our 70s, say 75, something like that. If our health allows, do you really think a 60 year old should have to abide by the decisions that their 15 year old self made as far as what they should be doing?

And so that’s kind of this problem, is that we’re set on this path that our much younger selves made, and we didn’t really have to deal with it until we’re older.

00;04;03;03 – 00;04;36;08
Laura
Right? Right. It’s this runway, right? Like an airplane. You’re just you’re on the path to go and it’s too late to turn back. And then you finally take off and there’s just, well, I’ve made my decisions and now I’m stuck. Right. So I, I actually pulled this quote out of your book. Talking about getting into med school, you know, it says, I think it’s wonderful that medical schools don’t only look at grades or test scores, but also look at life experiences.

What have you started? Who have you helped? What are your talents? What adversities have you overcome to get there? You want your physicians to be well-rounded people that care and that do different things and have multiple interests. So we take these creative people with creative entrepreneurial drive, and then we don’t let them do any of those things once they’re in the profession.

So like, what are some ways that, hospitals, medical facilities can help promote creativity with their physicians?

00;04;36;10 – 00;06;04;03
Dr. Charlop
Well, I’m so glad you brought this up because I call this the I mean, sorry I see so many problems. I call this the medical school paradox and the medical school paradox, just as you said, is that medical schools don’t just look at grades or mCAT scores to get into medical school. And we all have done this.

You’ve had to have done something fairly exceptional. Most people did more exceptional things than I did. They did. They were concert violinists or master chefs or the star of the lacrosse team, or they travel down and worked at a clinic to help underserved people in Guatemala. I mean, people did or wrote a novel or something like that, and people did all these extraordinary things

To get into medical school. And so medical school selects for people like this because they don’t just want, for lack of a better word, kind of book nerds. They want people that have outside interests and creativity and drive and everything else, which is great. And I totally support this. But as you said, the problem is that what often happens is once we’re in medical school and in residency and often even in practice, we can’t do those things.

We were the star lacrosse team. We were traveling to Guatemala regularly. Whatever. We were writing novels. But now we can’t do that because we’re too busy. We’re too tired. It’s not supported by the institution. So I think that’s the problem, the medical school paradox, and I think there’s solutions for it are a few fold. I think there’s two things that I think hospitals could do.

One of them is give your doctors an opportunity to contribute in a creative way to the hospital and actually support them in doing it. For example, maybe a doctor doesn’t like the food in the cafeteria and notices that the other doctors are unhappy with it. Perhaps that doctor wants to set something up like a farmer’s market or, a food truck Wednesday where food trucks come in and serve food.

If you have a doctor that wants to do something like that, and you could even throw ideas out there as an institution, you should support that. Because not only are they helping the hospital and the other doctors and the patients, but you’re helping that doctor feel valued and you’re giving them a creative way of actually doing something that goes beyond just their clinical work.

00;06;04;04 – 00;06;06;08
Laura
It’s the 80-20 rule you discussed. Can you explain the 80-20?

00;06;06;12 – 00;06;58;26
Dr. Charlop
Yeah. And, you know, so Google was kind of a pioneer a lot of places did this. And the idea was that some innovative companies, what they’re doing is they’re giving their employees some free time, if I could call it that, where they could work on a project of their choosing, now, the company would still own it. But, you know, because you’re paying them to work on it, but you’re allowing the person to come up with the idea and you’re giving them time to work on it and institutional support to work on it.

And so what it does is it empowers creative people to actually create new things that both keep them engaged and help the company. So to use this food court example, if you’ve got a doctor that wants to do it and you as a hospital are discouraging, well, you don’t have time enough to do call. You have to do this.

We’re not going to give you any money. You have to go through 500 committees. That person is going to lose interest and they’re going to get burnt out. But on the other hand, if you say, wow, this is so great, I’m willing that someone wants to take this responsibility on maybe you give them a little budget. You streamline the process through committees.

You’re encouraging the I call it the people upstairs, the admin people. If you’re one of the people upstairs and you are encouraging of this, that doctor is going to be so happy that project will lift beyond them. You know, if you set up the food court as an example, even if they leave in five years, that’s still there.

That distinguishes your hospital and it’ll inspire other physicians to take on projects.

00;06;58;28 – 00;07;13;02
Laura
Right? Right. Yeah. In your book, you discuss the way that Google used this was 80%. They gave their employees 80% of their time to work on the work for Google, right. And then 20% of the time was work on a passion project. So you said this is how Gmail was invented. Correct? And now look how it’s everywhere, right?

It’s what we all use. It’s amazing.

00;07;13;03 – 00;07;43;10
Dr. Charlop
I mean, a lot of a lot of the best ideas, we’re not come by some people sitting in a conference room staring at a whiteboard. A lot of ideas came by. People like you and me, you know, in the shower or you and me. We were trying to do something, but it was way more complicated than it should have been.

And we thought, well, why is this so difficult? And then you come up with, oh, well, maybe we should do this. That would make this much easier. Right. And so we had these ideas. But then the problem is the ideas often sort of wither on the vine because we don’t have time to follow them up or we don’t have the resources to follow them.

It’s the execution of the ideas what’s difficult. If we can create a nurturing environment that supports the execution of these clever ideas? Think of how much more we could accomplish

00;07;43;10 – 00;07;56;03
Laura
Right, exactly. And you know, it’s the time. It’s the time problem. It’s the work life balance. You don’t have the time in your personal life to accomplish these tasks because you’re if you’re a father, right? You want to be with your kids on Halloween, I get it. So I kind of want to change the tone a little bit. It’s, let’s talk about burnout. Burnout, It’s crisis.

00;07;56;04 – 00;08;16;21
Betsy
Wellness’ evil Twin. Yeah. You can’t have one without the other. So, so that said, too often it is burnout that, that makes people aware that wellness is needed. What are some ways that physicians can be proactive in taking wellness measures into their own hands before someone has to, take them aside and say something’s wrong with you, you need help.

00;08;17;10 – 00;10;03;29
Dr. Charlop
Well, I think there’s two components to it. One is what I would call sort of general wellness and resilience. And these are things that we should all be doing. For example, we should ensure as much as we can that we’re getting enough sleep, that we’re spending time with people that matter to us, whether it’s our family at home or our friends.

Perhaps I’ve had a conversation with a lot of people about this recently. We all have those college friends that we love that are some of our best friends, but they may live all the way across the country. We don’t see them that often. You know, we might text them here or there. We don’t see them that much.

We keep thinking, well, we’ll see them later. Oh, they’ll always be around. You have to intentionally carve out time to speak to them on the phone, go visit them, meet up in Vegas once a year. Whatever works for you. But you have to carve out time to see friends and family. Exercise. You need to go to the gym or play basketball or tennis or whatever you like.

Eating proper food. You know, all of these things are both good for general wellness, but they also improve mental health and mental resilience, and they help protect us from burnout to some degree. But the second thing, and this is more individualized, and this is what we all must do, is it’s worth spending some time to be introspective and think, why am I unhappy at work?

Or why am I unhappy in general? And a lot of times, if you actually spend some time thinking about it, you go back and forth. And this is what I do with my clients when I work with people through the physician on this project, because I consult people one on one, we spend a lot of time figuring out what is really the problem.

Is the problem that you’re just working too many hours? Is the problem that you’re working overnight and you just can’t do that anymore? Is the problem that you’ve got that toxic coworker that you just can’t stand. Is the problem you’re good with all that, but you just don’t want to work on weekends, or you want Christmas and Thanksgiving off, or whatever it may be.

Those problems are often solvable problems. You often, if you’ve identified what the problem is, if it’s the toxic coworker or over and I call, there’s often a solution to that. Now, conversely, unfortunately for some people, the problem really could be you just don’t like medicine anymore. The problem could be you’ve done this for so long, you feel like you’re as good as you could be, and now you want a different challenge.

And then those are those are more complicated things. You can solve those, too. But point is that for these things, introspection, usually discussion with a trusted peer or family member is required first to try to pinpoint the 1 or 2 things that are really getting under your skin.

00;10;04;00 – 00;10;31;13
Laura
Right? Right. So, in your book, you encourage people just like that to question what is it exactly? Figure out the problem. Is it the overnights? Is it is it the pay? Do I want more pay? So, you know, an emergency physician stressors are going to look different from a radiologist from a lot of the radiologists that I speak with.

It’s this strict adherence to RVU’s It’s administrative work that they just don’t have the time for. It can be an overwhelm with the amount of reading that they have because the backlogs are so bad. So is there do you have any advice for radiologists in particular? I know it’s case to case, but just in general, you know, they’re kind of in the back and not up front in the hospital with patients.

Is there anything that you could tell our radiologists?

00;10;31;15 – 00;12;10;23
Dr. Charlop
Absolutely. So I think again, the key, as you mentioned is first to figure out what the problem is. And then if you figure out the problem, oftentimes you can within your existing group negotiate a solution to the problem. So if you’ve identified you really don’t like working nights or you really need to have holidays off or you can’t start before 9:00 because you really want to take your kids into school in the morning, those kind of problems, most of us can negotiate with our groups because the thing is, there’s a big physician shortage, as we all know.

And so if there’s ever a time that you want to negotiate something with your group, it’s now because most groups do not want to lose you. And this is true for radiologists. Your group does not want you to walk out the door, because if you walk out the door, it’s going to be hard for them to replace you.

So if you can come to the table and say, look, I really like the group, I want to do all these things, but I don’t want to start before 9:00. Nine times out of ten you can work something out where maybe you do something else instead, and they let you start at nine because they really don’t want you to leave.

And so a lot of doctors, we have this leverage, but we either don’t know how to use it or we’re afraid to use it. I don’t know if any of you have watched the movie swingers. You know, they talk about you’ve got these claws. Use your claws. Well, I’ll tell you, radiologist, you’ve got claws. Use them and say, look, I don’t want to be on calling weekends or whatever it is.

Offer something else so you could work out a deal. Now, if that doesn’t work, you have other options. It could be that you just switch groups instead of being with the group you’re in. Just go to the group down the block or across town and come in to them and say, look, I’m a great radiologist. I have a lot to offer.

I just don’t want to start before 9 a.m.. Is there something that we could work out? And you almost certainly could do it. And a third option, which I like, is there’s lots of nontraditional ways of doing clinical medicine. Now, you could do locum tenants or locum tenants firms find people, you can do per diem and per diem is a little different than locum tenants.

And that essentially you’re a freelancer and you offer your days here or there to different groups. So for example, say you live in LA and you work per diem. You might work, you know, 3 or 4 different hospitals or a couple different groups. And each month or two you kind of pick a few days and you plug it in.

And so and you make your schedule. That’s nice because you control your schedule. You do what you want. So there’s a lot of different ways between per diem, locum tenants, switching groups or renegotiating within your group. But you could solve nearly all these problems.

00;12;10;25 – 00;12;21;28
Betsy
Yes. We say that per diem, it’s all often discussed as independent contractor work. And we do speak with a lot of radiologists regularly that have struck out on their own so they can carve out their own schedules and, and do something flexible that works for them.

00;12;22;01 – 00;12;26;20
Laura
Here at Excalibur, we do teleradiology. So a lot of our doctors are given the flexibility in their scheduling, which is really nice for them.

00;12;26;20 – 00;13;00;09
Betsy
Yeah, we find out when they can work and when they would like to work. And we try to work with them, to alleviate the pressures of feeling like they’re overscheduled or can’t get to the other events in their life that they want to get to some problems can be solved, but with emergency medicine and some physicians duties, there’s if everybody didn’t want to work the late shift and, everyone got what they wanted, there would be no people on the late shift to serve the patients.

I do think that there’s probably a wellness solution that is, addressing burdens as a shared team. It could be a wellness initiative for practices.

00;13;00;11 – 00;15;11;10
Dr. Charlop
Yeah you know, that’s a that’s a great question. It’s a very good question. And just before I answer that, I do want to say there are some situations, especially with hybrid work. Let’s say you have a couple with kids and one person is a radiologist. And then their spouse, let’s say is a marketer or something like that. And, and the marketer has to go into the office, say, Wednesday and Thursday.

Now, the radiologist may not mind call or may not even mind working on weekends, but they really want Wednesday and Thursday off because they know that their spouse is going to be in the office that day. So when you can accommodate them, that’s great, because now they have their childcare sorted out, they’re happy, and they could then potentially work nights or weekends or other things.

They just don’t want to work Wednesday and Thursday because of their family situation. But you are right, you know if there are certain things are difficult, you know most people don’t want to work nights, most people don’t want to work weekends, they don’t want to work holidays. I know I’m no different than anyone else. You know, some there are some business solutions to it.

You know, the obvious ones like pay more, give some other benefit to people that do nights. If, for example, the people that agree to work nights maybe only have shorter shifts during the day, or the people that agree to work nights never have to work holidays, or the people that agree to work nights. Get first choice for vacation weeks.

There are negotiated solutions to a lot of these things. For example, within our old anesthesia department, we have everybody had to take call. But what they would do is some of the older physicians, they would say, well, you don’t have to take call, but in exchange, what they did is they had some of the longer daytime shifts.

They’re not desirable, but they’re not call. So there are sometimes negotiated solutions you could do to this, but I think otherwise, you know, with nights, unfortunately the evidence is clear that working nights is harmful for your health. It’s considered by the WHO as a carcinogen. It disrupts your circadian rhythms. You lose sleep. It harms your ability to connect with other humans.

I mean, there’s just the night shift is clearly, for 99% of us, not desirable. I think if you’re going to do it, most likely the best way is to clump nights together and then to help people figure out ways that they could recuperate afterwards. And it may be being in dark environments during the day, figuring out ways you could offer the gym or some other ways of exercising at night, offer kind of best practices for how to reset your circadian rhythm during night shifts.

A big one is if you’re working in a hospital at night. And I remember this year I used to work in the hospital. Sometimes I’d be there in the middle of the night, and I’d want to go get a snack or two in the morning. At two in the morning, the snacks are vending machine. So it’s me by myself in this nearly empty cafeteria, lit by two light bulbs and a vending machine.

And I’m sitting there and I’m thinking, I went through medical school so I could be eating, you know, some vending machine food at two in the morning by myself in a cafeteria. I mean, that’s depressing stuff. So there are things hospitals could do to make the nights more attractive. If you figure out a way of having good food, even at night, you know, ask any doctor if you have free food that that, that has a big positive effect.

00;15;11;11 – 00;15;11;22
Laura
That’s also, universal.

00;15;11;22 – 00;15;39;11
Betsy
You know, I’m quite I’m quite surprised now that you point now that you pointed out, it’s so obvious that there should health systems be doing more for what is an insurmountable burden, which is keeping physicians in a hospital 24 hours a day? And the description of the vending machines. I hadn’t thought about it before.

There really isn’t anything that makes you feel okay. Can’t they even, I don’t know, maybe make a nicer lounge? What? Is there something? Are there any health systems that have an innovative approach to, the vending machine problem?

00;15;39;12 – 00;16;32;28
Dr. Charlop
You know, it’s funny, because I actually, I remember this it was years ago, but I remember I took a selfie. This must be like ten years ago. It was like me by myself in the cafeteria at two in the morning by a vending machine. And I remember it stuck with me because I thought, you know, sometimes you’re in a situation, you question your life’s choices.

I’m just sitting there questioning my life’s choices. You know, I was eating, you know, a hostess cupcake or something at two in the morning. And I was just thinking, what have I done? And so I do think there are solutions to this if a hospital’s going to spend money and it’s not even that much money, like you said, you could have a lounge or some dedicated space where you actually have nutritious food that’s stocked at night.

It could be salad. I mean, you don’t have to have a chef there, but you can have like a case that has like some nice salads, you know, some nice wraps, nice things. They were freshly prepared. Yeah, yeah. Nutritional and tasty and weren’t just left over because they weren’t sold during the day but were actually intentionally put there at night right.

And if the lounge has some way that the night people could socialize with each other, you know, maybe a pool table or some nice TVs or a coffee bar or whatever. I mean, anything to make it less horrible, because then you go in and you think it gives you something to look forward to, that when you’re on your break, maybe you could shoot pool or have a nice salad, or have a coffee or something with the other people that are there, and you could all commiserate together and think, yeah, like, well, we’re all stuck here, but at least we’re having fun.

00;16;32;29 – 00;16;45;08
Laura
Misery loves company. So on a positive note, a recent American Medical Association came out with a survey that said physician burnout rates have dropped below 50% for the first time in four years. So, I mean, since Covid, things have gone, it’s finally starting to maybe lift.

00;16;45;12 – 00;16;46;01
Betsy
That’s still a high number, though.

00;16;46;01 – 00;17;02;08
Laura
It’s not great. Yeah. No, it’s not good. But, you know, these are these doctors. These physicians are the people who are caring for our families and our friends. Our loved ones. It’s concerning that the burnout rate is so high. We can’t afford to lose these well-trained, creative, hardworking, smart professionals. So where do we go from here?

What’s this? I mean, I know what’s the solution?

00;17;02;09 – 00;17;56;20
Dr. Charlop
Well, I tell you, I was. I saw those numbers, too. I was happy about it. I think we’ll have to give it a little time to see whether that sort of statistical noise or whether that represents a trend in the right direction. I pray that it is. You know, one of my family members recently had a health scare.

And I’ll tell you, I was very thankful, as you said, that there were well-trained, experienced physicians that could help her. So I’m on board. We need to find a way of keeping people happy. You know, I think the problem fundamentally is that. When I was younger and I decided to go into medicine, they were really kind of three, if I could call it this high powered sort of professional careers that I was aware of, you could become a doctor, you could become a lawyer, or you could do something in finance or consulting.

And almost all of my friends went into one of those three things. I chose medicine. Now there’s like a million things you could do. I mean, there’s so many cool things that you can do from being an entrepreneur, which is much easier today. Being a digital creator, doing some sort of digital nomad thing where you’re traveling the world.

I mean, there’s just so many more options now for smart, driven people than there were back then. And so my worry is that, for lack of a better word, medicine is kind of competing against more other fields than before.

00;17;56;21 – 00;17;59;04
Betsy
That’s an interesting observation. I hadn’t thought about that.

00;17;59;05 – 00;18;00;20
Dr. Charlop
Right. I mean, right, just

00;18;00;22 – 00;18;01;13
Betsy
Technology.

00;18;01;14 – 00;18;12;04
Dr. Charlop
I was like, well, I don’t think I don’t want to do finance. I thought about law, but I think, well, it’s a lot of reading, so I’ll do medicine. But now if I were, you know, 17 and you told me I could just take a laptop and a backpack and live wherever I wanted to do something remote and creative, I would do that.

00;18;12;05 – 00;18;13;00
Laura
Right? Right.

00;18;13;01 – 00;18;27;02
Dr. Charlop
So how do you how do you attract people from that, into medicine? And so I think medicine has to evolve and reflect some of the kind of perks and interesting features these other jobs have. Radiology in some ways is better positioned to do that then I think nearly every other medical field, because in radiology you have more work from home opportunities.

00;18;27;02 – 00;18;27;18
Betsy
Yes.

00;18;27;20 – 00;18;43;20
Dr. Charlop
Than you do in almost every other medical field. And so if I were the head of radiology programs I would figure well how can we accommodate this. How can we make a more fun for our radiologists so they could work from different places or work in different hours or something like that. Let’s embrace technology to support them.

And I think that would make radiology truthfully one of the cooler fields of medicine to go into.

00;18;43;22 – 00;19;25;29
Betsy
You have the point teleradiology is reaching critical mass. And now every facility can consider it. The technology has become ubiquitous and it’s more affordable. And the connections, can you can get an internet connection just about anywhere and read from just about anywhere. So yeah, it’s less of a problem. As far as there’s some there’s some issues that are alleviated.

They, they’re the commutes aren’t wearing on them obviously if they’re reading from wherever they want. But the sheer number of studies that need to be read and the number of radiologists that exists to read them, is, it counteracts the convenience of teleradiology, the, you can find work and there is it’s abundant.

So I guess it’s good that there’s a lot of choices for where and when you work with teleradiology. Yes. Yeah.

00;19;26;00 – 00;19;34;17
Dr. Charlop
I’m going to give a kind of a counterintuitive partial solution to that. And my sense is that a person in radiology is a good example of this. A person who works part time is better than a person who leaves the field altogether.

00;19;34;20 – 00;19;35;02
Betsy
Yes.

00;19;35;03 – 00;19;56;08
Dr. Charlop
Because in my mind, I think, well, there’s x number of images that need to be read, and then we have y number of people to read them, or y number of person hours to read them. The more person hours you could throw into the mix the better. And I can’t tell you how many people I’ve seen, let’s say a mother of a one year old, she could either work two days a week reading images, or she could leave radiology altogether because she wants, because her employer will not allow her to work two days a week.

00;19;56;10 – 00;19;56;21
Laura
Right.

00;19;56;22 – 00;20;41;23
Dr. Charlop
I say I’d rather let her work two days a week, keep her in the mix, get her to read what she can during those days rather than lose her from the field altogether.

Or you have someone who’s an entrepreneur. They want to start a business. You’re going to laugh at this. But we have this sort of joke I mentioned this at work some years ago and everybody who heard me was like, I want to do it. And we have this idea about having a Dunkin Donuts truck, and you get a Dunkin Donuts truck and, you know, you serve all the Dunkin Donuts stuff and you drive from place to place to do, you know, like different hospitals or busy places.

You just have coffee. It’d be right outside, you know, they can come, they can get their coffee and their donuts and stuff. Everybody who heard this thought they wanted to do it, but say you wanted to do some sort of creative idea, or you wanted to start your own business or whatever, but you still want to put food on the table.

You don’t want to go all in on the Dunkin Donuts truck. Oh what do you do. Well you keep your radiology job and you work six, eight days, ten days a month. You’re putting food on the table, you have a guaranteed income. You’re maintaining your skills. But do you have enough time on the side to pursue these other creative projects.

Alternatively, you risk losing someone and they just go into the Dunkin Donuts thing and they never come back.

00;20;41;24 – 00;20;51;16
Laura
Right, right. That’s an excellent solution. It’s a compromise between, you know, you remain a physician and you get to work on your creative problems. It’s great. So you’ve recently put out a online course, correct. Would you like to discuss that a little bit?

00;20;51;17 – 00;21;30;29
Dr. Charlop
Yes, I have I have two online courses. One is about physician burnout and we talk about the causes, how you could try to figure out why you may be burnt out. And then we go into some solutions for it. And then the other is specifically on locum tenens. A lot of people are curious about locum tenens. They want to try, but they don’t know how it works or, what the downsides are.

And so we kind of talk about I think personally it’s a wonderful opportunity for most people because you get flexibility. It typically pays more and it gives you control over your schedule. But, but there are some downsides to it. You know, there is some, some risk that you may not get as much work as you want, or you might get stuck into a place without much of an onboarding process.

So we talk about how to make locum tenant successful. So I have they’re both teachable courses. And they’re very easy to use. You can do it from home.

00;21;31;01 – 00;21;34;08
Laura
Sure. We’ll link those in the show notes. Is there anything else you would like to discuss before we wrap this up?

00;21;34;11 – 00;21;43;08
Dr. Charlop
I think those are the main things. If you want to reach out to me directly, if you want to do, if you want some consulting to try to figure out why you’re burnt out, what you could do about it. I do consult one on one with people. You I’m sure you have the website in the show notes.

00;21;43;08 – 00;21;44;07
Betsy
We’ll include it in the show notes.

00;21;44;08 – 00;22;18;00
Dr. Charlop
I am active on LinkedIn, so if you want to just chat, I’m on LinkedIn all the time. I recently joined X, which I also find kind of fun and the Physician Wellness Project book help give you some ideas about this, but I think the one thing I would just add is just from my recent personal experience with my family health issue, I did used to say to people, well, if you’re not really happy with medicine, go do something else.

But now, I’ve come to realize how important it is that people like us, who have gone through the training to become doctors, still practice medicine because there really is a need for it, and we’re all going to get older. We’re all going to have family members that get older, get sick. We all are going to need medical care and I hope that someone is there for us.

So I think we need to be there for them.

00;22;18;14 – 00;22;22;08
Betsy
That’s a very that’s a very, caring compassionate. Thank you.

00;22;22;09 – 00;22;29;18
Laura
All right. Doctor Charlop. Thank you so much for sitting down to discuss all of these wellness and burnout issues with us today. It was a really insightful, very, very interesting conversation. Thank you.

00;22;29;20 – 00;22;30;10
Dr. Charlop
All right. Well, thank you both.

00;22;30;10 – 00;22;30;27
Laura
Thank you again.

00;22;30;27 – 00;22;31;25
Dr. Charlop
For your time and for inviting me.

00;22;31;28 – 00;24;43;17
Laura
Of course. Thanks for coming. Thank you for watching. RadCentral is a production of Excalibur Healthcare. Make sure to like and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. From all of us at Excalibur, have a great week!

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** The views, opinions, and statements expressed by guests on this RadCentral are solely their own and do not necessarily reflect the views, opinions, or positions of the RadCentral podcast, Excalibur Healthcare, or its hosts. Excalibur Healthcare does not endorse or guarantee the accuracy, completeness, or reliability of any information shared by guests during the episodes. *

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