“It’s been said the professions with the highest amount of workplace bullying are education, finance, and medicine. Yes — medicine. The science of healing others is also the space where harm is inflicted on the healer with impunity. Why don’t we hear about it more? Because our system isn’t built for physicians to speak out.
As a physician, you inherently lead a team, and the goal is what’s best for the patients. However, you start to notice the same errors occur repeatedly and then later find that you’ve been undermined by management, who minimize those errors and dismiss your attempts to correct them. Management portrays the individual who is trying to professionally elevate the team members as making a big deal out of nothing.
You now have extended the psychological trauma of abuse on the victims, while the abuser appears to be “mentoring.” Abusers advocate for patient harm to accomplish their vendetta, which trickles down to malicious character-assassinating rumors and closed doors. It’s one of the most criminal strategies for breeding toxicity within a team, damaging relationships among team members and leading to conflict.
Given my outstanding reputation among my colleagues, I was convinced I would not be targeted, only to find the groupI thought would surely be supportive of me mysteriously aligned with the perpetrator, waging an all-out war on both me and my patients.
Given my outstanding reputation among my colleagues, I was convinced I would not be targeted, only to find the groupI thought would surely be supportive of me mysteriously aligned with the perpetrator, waging an all-out war on both me and my patients.
The bullying resulted in an inordinate amount of waste: expenditures, reduction of my ability to help more people, inability for existing patients to access care, increased cost burdens to patients, financial rewarding to those who joined in on the mobbing, and no ability for new patients to be seen, further bloating the healthcare system, all thanks to one charismatic Machiavellian middle manager fueling whose voices were heard and whose weren’t.
The systemic destruction of a physician doesn’t end at the physician. The workplace bystanders – who know what they see happening is abusive and wrong – are wedded to silence out of fear of losing their jobs, which leaves them also psychologically traumatized, especially when the target is the physician who connects the most with all staff members. The trauma also extends to the patients.
They have to make vague, uncomfortable phone calls to the office without receiving an answer why they are unable to schedule an appointment with their physician. Some are forced to move to another location to get their treatments, and some are no longer able to receive treatments due to age or travel concerns. Patients write in droves about their concerns and access to the physician, who has been stripped of support staff, resulting in further delays in care.
Patients write in droves about their concerns and access to the physician, who has been stripped of support staff, resulting in further delays in care.
The correct answer is not available due to the “political nature,” so the organization has to find workarounds. It is one of the most atrocious realities I have ever had to face as a healthcare provider.
The end outcome for all bullied physicians is that you “choose” to resign or get terminated, but either way, you’re out of a job. If you choose termination, you subject yourself to a future of limited employment opportunities.
The available options are often abusive and toxic, entailing intensive surveillance by state medical boards, which is on par with probation, and including mandatory testing and travel for in-person meetings, all of which must be paid out of one’s own pocket. So the abusive workplace has a lingering effect in the form of financial abuse.
So our healers leave the workplace as though leaving a war zone, with psychological damage that can be objectively measured, and with the knowledge that the truth will never be revealed. Some leave medicine completely to pursue other forms of employment.
The unfortunate fact is these physicians tend to be the most ethical and pro-patient but are driven from their passion due to a profound fear of ever again being in a position where someone constructs a false image of them behind the scenes, a projection of THEIR image.”