Workforce

On May 23, 2022, U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, MD, issued an advisory on health worker burnout and wellbeing, declaring the situation a “crisis,” and addressing it a “top national priority.”

This month’s cover story on rheumatology and burnout brings to the fore numerous issues and challenges for our profession for both physicians and advanced practitioners.

My path to rheumatology was certainly not one that I had planned on, or even dreamed about, during nursing school.

As a fourth-year medical student doing an elective rotation in rheumatology, I was initially impressed by my first mentor, Dr. Harry Spiera, section chief and clinician extraordinaire at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City.

An “undercurrent of racism” runs throughout academic medicine, resulting in not only “disillusionment and attrition,” but also internalized racism among underrepresented groups, according to a letter published in The Lancet.

From the latter stages of medical school to the precarious steps involved in carving out a subspecialty, and throughout the turbulent transitions experienced by young physicians, the advice and guidance of mentors is often invaluable.

Fears of an oncology workforce shortage have been mounting for more than a decade as both the percentage of oncologists nearing retirement age and number of Americans with a history of cancer increase annually.

We read, with great concern, the recent article regarding workforce challenges in pediatric ophthalmology (Healio/Ocular Surgery News, Jan. 25, 2023, page 1).

During my internal medicine training, I was fascinated by immunology and marveled at the antigen and antibody formations formulated with exposures to medications, environmental agents or genetic predispositions.

An ironic twist of the COVID-19 pandemic was that as most of the world huddled indoors, opportunities for health care professionals to communicate and collaborate across great distances flourished, particularly in rheumatology.