“Time in the bank: A Stanford plan to save doctors from burnout”
“The meals, housecleaning and a host of other services — babysitting, elder care, movie tickets, grant writing help, handyman services, dry cleaning pickup, speech training, Web support and more — are part of a groundbreaking new “time banking” program aimed to ease work-life conflicts for the emergency medicine faculty.
Doctors can “bank” the time they spend doing the often-unappreciated work of mentoring, serving on committees, covering colleagues’ shifts on short notice or deploying in emergencies, and earn credits to use for work or home-related services.
The simple idea is aimed at addressing a complex challenge: Doctors, on average, work 10 hours more a week than other professionals, with nearly 40 percent working 60 hours or more, according to a 2012 study published in the Archives of Internal Medicine…
Beyond burnout, Stanford’s time bank is also designed to help stave off the steep attrition rate of women in academic medicine and science. For the past two decades, a recent study found that women have made up about half of all medical school graduates. But they account for only 19 percent of medical school full professors and 11 percent of medical school deans.”
This is really brilliant and thoughtful and responsive policy making. It’s sort of just being kind, and taking communal responsibility for burdens. It’s saying “these are common problems, but that doesn’t mean they have to exist”.
They also piloted this in STEM academia, which makes sense given that research professors who work really long hours chasing the dwindling grant dollars and receiving insufficient recognition for teaching and mentorship activities.
I know more about this in academia, where people come into the job and are literally on something called the “tenure clock” for several years — when it “run out”, they go up for review and have to prove that they deserve tenure. At most institutions, what counts are papers and grant money; not necessarily the outcomes for students that needed a lot of mentorship, the quality of their input on departmental/University committees, or even the quality of their courses. When my Dad was a professor, he was told point-blank to spend as little time as possible teaching because it would take away time from his research. It’s a huge problem, because these almost anti-incentivized activities are fundamentally important for the wider system to function and continue to produce great scientists and well educated undergraduate and graduate students.
Additionally, as discussed in this article, it’s often women who spend more time on these “voluntary” activities, especially when it gets to a point where “someone has to do it” and the department head just kinda taps someone. And if you are a member of an underrepresented minority group (gender, race, sexual identity, etc…) you also end up being tapped for more projects and more mentorship and are sometimes hired with the implicit assumption that you will fix the social climate.
So, we need some incentives and some creative payment and this is it. I love the idea of an economy that uses convenience and care as a currency.
Related: A high rate of suicide among doctors
(credit to KM)
