Can a Twitter Chat Treat Physician Burnout? Let Me Count the Ways.
Screen Time Brings Humanity, and Humanities, to Busy Doctors
How are you doing? If you’re a doctor, there’s a good chance that you’re feeling somewhat-to-seriously burned out. Physician burnout is, according to a much-discussed paper published by a trio of our most significant healthcare organizations, a public health crisis. “[W]e recognize the need to further empower health care providers and support their emotional, physical, social, and intellectual health,” says Steven Defossez, paper co-author and VP for Clinical Integration Massachusetts Health and Hospital Association (MHA), in a media release. You may be aware that sitting at computer, endlessly filling in EHR fields has been linked to physician burnout—but you may not know that there’s a different kind of screen time out there, one that delivers the empowerment that Defossez seeks.
I’m talking about #medhumchat.
For the Twitter-phobic and literature-averse: #medhumchat is a hashtag, an abbreviation of “Medical Humanities Chat.” It’s a regularly recurring conversation, conducted on the famed social network, in which doctors, patients, and even humanists like me spend an hour (Wednesday nights at 9 p.m. ET) doing a close read of high-quality pieces of poetry and prose. So far, we’ve explicated Mary Oliver, Rafael Campo, Chana Bloch, and Maya Angelou (among others). The mission statement of #medhumchat—“fostering reflection, empathy and connection in healthcare through discussions of poetry and prose”—seems a direct answer to Defossez’s call for help, and as we’re currently in National Poetry Month, now is a superb time to talk about it.
The germ of the idea floated into the universe on December 16, 2018, when Colleen Farrell, #medhumchat’s founder and host and a resident in internal medicine at NYU, tweeted: “Hey #medtwitter, I'm toying with the idea of starting a narrative medicine twitter chat. each week we discuss a poem, essay, short story (something very brief!) relevant to medicine and our experience. Would folks be interested? Would you participate? Does this already exist?” Nearly a month later, the chatter began, and it’s been running on a more-or-less weekly ever since.
Hey #medtwitter, I'm toying with the idea of starting a narrative medicine twitter chat. each week we discuss a poem, essay, short story (something very brief!) relevant to medicine and our experience. Would folks be interested? Would you participate? Does this already exist?
— Colleen Farrell, MD (@colleenmfarrell) December 16, 2018
