Tim Olaore, “Mr. Meaningful Work,” says that in a career of serving and caring for others, pediatric professionals can be deeply fulfilled—and extremely challenged. Pediatrics requires endless effort and motivation of its providers, in order for them to be the best possible patient advocates and connect meaningfully with parents while prioritizing continuing education. 

In his “Ignite and Never Lose your I.M.P.A.C.T.” presentation during the recent NRC Health 2023 Pediatric Collaborative, Olaore used a song to help reignite motivation and combat burnout, using a framework to create an internal source of motivation to fuel the ongoing journey of meaningful work.

“Burnout starts when energy turns into exhaustion, involvement turns into cynicism, and efficacy turns into ineffectiveness,” Olaore says. “The thing that we really want to focus on is the word energy. Energy goes when it turns into exhaustion—and what we’ve found is that the factors that contribute to burnout are both personal and environmental. For a long time, there has been work to separate and study them independently. But we’ve seen in recent research that it’s getting harder and harder to separate those things because they are very much intertwined. You have to look at them together.” 

Olaore explained that cross-sectional studies have linked burnout with suboptimal patient-care practices, double the risk of medical error, and a 17% increased chance of being named in a medical-practice lawsuit. So there are some real-life effects of that energy switch to exhaustion. Each one-point increase in emotional exhaustion or one-point decrease in job satisfaction, he noted, was associated with a 28–67% greater likelihood of reducing professional effort and work hours over a payroll year. If you extrapolate that to the national level in the United States, it results in an estimated annual loss of productivity equal to the loss of the entire graduating class of seven medical schools. 

“A lot of the work that we do, a lot of the energy that we deploy, and a lot of the energy that we get are from people,” Olaore says. “And the way you make sure that you’re getting the right type of energy to you, or ensure that you’re storing the right type of energy, is by improving your ability to build trust for folks to be able to let folks in. We discussed vulnerability, the ability to let folks in, and for you to pour yourself appropriately into others. And that starts with building a reservoir of trust.” 

Click here for more on this presentation and the NRC Health 2023 Pediatric Conference.