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Village Books
Amazon
Dr. Pietro Emanuele Garbelli speaks out on serious professional issues faced by modern healthcare workers, in The Doctor’s Voice.
Doctors deal with overwhelming stress, leading to burnout, illness, many of them leaving the profession, and even a higher-than-average rate of suicide. The Covid19 pandemic both heightened and helped illuminate some of the causes of this stress, prompting author Garbelli to write this book as a set of advice for his colleagues and as advocacy for broader changes in hospitals and other healthcare systems.
Garbelli highlights a common disconnect in communication—administrators and higher-ups telling doctors what to do while those doctors don’t have much opportunity to bring up the problems they encounter day-to-day.
Planning made without doctor input leads to a near-constant state of crisis and under-staffing. Restrictions on what treatments a doctor is allowed to authorize—while sometimes established for patient protection—lead to consistent delays and create an atmosphere of mistrust. Corporate command structures obfuscate who even makes these significant decisions.
Doctors take on major risk, without enough authority to justify it, nor enough protection to ease the stress of it. All the while, they deal with equally stressed colleagues, superiors who don’t always listen to their proposals, and countless little inefficiencies in a system often more interested in money than effective care.
The Doctor’s Voice offers valuable advice, from the individual to the organization.
Garbelli returns frequently to the idea of communication. How important it is to develop one’s own communication skills to be heard by those with power, as well as how damaging a one-way, top-to-bottom system is to an organization as a whole.
He proposes the use of modern data technology to make it easy for doctors to record and share stumbling blocks they encounter. Discussing information systems as they are now, he points out the needless frustration of dealing with myriad incompatible programs to access something as vital as a patient’s medical records.
Serving as a starting point for further discussion, The Doctor’s Voice stays true to its name—laying out problems that doctors, and healthcare workers in general, often suffer in silence.
The author writes about these issues clearly and concisely, making the information easily graspable even by laymen. While directed primarily at other doctors, this book is a valuable read for anyone working—or even just interested—in healthcare, as it makes obvious how sorely change is needed.
Garbelli maintains a broad scope, focused on showing how universal these frustrations are within his profession. The Doctor’s Voice ultimately encourages doctors to free themselves from restrictive senses of professionalism and speak openly about the stressors that need to be fixed.
Impactful as advocacy for changing a broken system, and important as a frank discussion about the mental toll on individuals, The Doctor’s Voice sheds light on issues that will only become more important as time goes on.
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