Hospital Medicine Management in the Time of COVID-19: Preparing for a Sprint and a Marathon

Focus on Wellness

Providers are battling a laundry list of both clinical and personal stressors. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has already recognized that stress and mental health are going to be large hurdles for both patients and providers during this crisis.⁸ From the beginning, hospitalist leadership should be attuned to physician wellness and be aware that burnout, mental and physical exhaustion, and the possibility of contracting COVID-19 will be issues in the coming weeks and months. Volunteerism is built into the physician’s work ethic, but we must be mindful about its cost for long-term staffing demands. In addition, scarce medical resources add an additional moral strain for clinicians as they face tough allocation decisions, as we’ve seen with our Italian colleagues.⁹

As regular meetings around COVID-19 have become commonplace, we’ve made sure to set aside defined time for staff to discuss and reflect on their experiences. Doing so has allowed our clinicians to feel heard and to acknowledge the difficulties they are facing in their clinical duties. Leaders should also consider frequent check-ins with individual providers. At our institution, the first positive COVID-19 patient did not radically change any protocol that was in place, but a check-in with the hospitalist on service that day proved helpful for a debrief and processing opportunity. Individual conversations can help those on the front lines feel supported and remind them they are not operating alone in an anonymous vacuum.

Continue by celebrating small victories because this marathon is not going to end with an obvious finish line or a singular moment in which everyone can rejoice. A negative test, a patient with a good outcome, and a donation of PPE are all opportunities to celebrate. It may be what keeps us going when there is no end in sight. We have relied on these celebrations and moments of levity as an integral part of our regular group meetings.

At the end of this pandemic, just as we hope that our social distancing feels like an overreaction, we similarly hope that our sprint to build capacity ends up being unnecessary as well. As we wrote this Perspectives piece, uncertainty about the extent, length, and impact of this pandemic still existed. By the time it is published it may be that the sprint is over, and the marathon is beginning. Or, if our wildest hopes come true, there will be no marathon to run at all.