Essays by physicians from a wide variety of specialties who discuss their personal struggles and triumphs associated with patient care
Focusing on best practices for physician education to improve their resilience to work-related stressors by expanding their repertoire of coping
A new, comprehensive model for understanding and guiding help for those affected by compassion fatigue by improving their work satisfaction and other strategies
A discussion of the ethical requirements of self-care among physicians starting in medical school
Institutional responsibilities for the medical and mental health of those who work in the House of Medicine extend to required screening for work-related stress injuries, accommodations for those who are affected and require attention and release time
Keeping doctors happy and productive requires a thorough understanding of the systemic causes and consequences of physician stress, as well as the role of resilience in maintaining a healthy mental state. The pressure of making life-or-death decisions along with those associated with the day-to-day challenges of doctoring can lead to poor patient care and communication, patient dissatisfaction, absenteeism, reductions in productivity, job dissatisfaction, and lowered retention.

This edited volume will provide a comprehensive tool for understanding and promoting physician stress resilience. Specifically, the book has six interrelated objectives that, collectively, would advance the evidence-based understanding of (1) the extent to which physicians experience and suffer from work-related stress; (2) the various manifestations, syndromes, and reaction patterns directly caused by work-related stress; (3) the degree to which physicians are resilient in that they are successful or not successful in coping with these stressors; (4) the theories and direct evidence that account for the resilience; (5) the programs during and following medical school which help to promote resilience; and (6) the agenda for future theory, research, and intervention efforts for the next generation of physicians.

Section One Introduction to the Stress of Being a Medical Student
Chapter 1. Distributed emotional intelligence: A resource to help medical students learn in stressful settings
Chapter 2. First clinical attachments: informal learning and stressors in the clinical environment
Chapter 3. Between two worlds: medical students narrating identity tensions
Chapter 4. Laughter for coping: medical students' narrating professionalism dilemmas
Chapter 5. Bringing complexity thinking to curriculum development: Implications for faculty and medical student stress and resilience
Section Two Introduction to the Stress of Being A Physician
Chapter 6. Maintaining a balance: doctors caring for people who are dying and their families
Chapter 7. Physician Stress: Compassion Satisfaction, Compassion Fatigue and Vicarious Traumatization
Chapter 8. The Medico-Legal Environment, and How Medico-Legal Matters Impact on the Doctor: Research Findings from an Australian Study
Chapter 9: How Doctors Become Patients
Chapter 10. The Impaired Physician
Chapter 11. Healthy Docs = Healthy Patients: arguably the most important reason to care about physician health
Section 3 Introduction to Management of Physician Stress
Chapter 12. Overcopers: Medical Doctor Vulnerability to Compassion Fatigue
Chapter 13. Stress and Coping Generational and Gender Similarities and Differences
Chapter 14. Treatment and Prevention Work: Center for Practitioner Renewal
Chapter 15: Promoting resilience and posttraumatic growth in physicians
Chapter 16. Ethical Decisions: Stress and Distress in Medicine
Section 4 Introduction to Personal Reflections
Chapter 17. Surgery
Chapter 18. The gifts of palliative care: sometimes awkward always wholesome
Chapter 19. Pediatrics: If Only it was Just the Kids
Chapter 20. Psychiatrists in Distress: When Work Becomes A Problem
Chapter 21. Medical Students and Residents
Chapter 22. Family Medicine: I will never fly in a helicopter again
Chapter 23. Anesthesiology: Personal Reflections
Chapter 24. Emergency Medicine
Chapter 25. Conclusions