No one in the research world wants to admit that Direct Primary Care pretty much solves most burnout issues. Instead, they do no-look passes and create new terms so they can go on speaking tours and lecture the same administrators that continue to burnout more doctors.

Let’s look at this article: Primary Care Workforce Burnout Goes Beyond EHR Use to Leadership Style. I want to distill their “findings” for you but I am unable to translate the language. Let me list some of the verbal diarrhea that makes this research so amazing. Here are some quotes with my thoughts in the parenthesis:

• Facilitative leadership strays from traditional hierarchal structures, allowing for practices to foster emerging leadership skills among all practice members, the study authors explained. (WTF does this even mean?).
• “Larger practices and health systems can promote leadership and agency by delegating decision making to the lowest possible level of their organizations, and practices of all configurations could benefit from interprofessional leadership development,” the authors wrote. (Is this another language?).
• Most “zero-burnout” practices also leveraged quality improvement strategies more frequently than facilities that experience higher rates of workforce burnout. (“zero-burnout”? Yeah, that’s a lie).
• “Burnout improvement efforts should consider focusing on whole practices and the systems in which they are nested,” the authors asserted. (I have a magnolia tree with a bird’s nest outside my house. Is that the same thing?).
• “Smaller practice arrangements with fewer employees may have better communication, stronger in-practice relationships, and increased agency, which together could contribute to less burnout,” the study authors noted. (No sh%t, Sherlock. That’s why DPC works!).

I do not understand anything they wrote. I am but a simple Caveman. But that being said, these authors finally surprised me and woke me from my stupor when they wrote this:

“Although there has been a trend toward consolidation, smaller independent practices remain a critical component of primary care in the US, with small practice models such as direct primary care emerging,” the report authors wrote.

And like a bad cliffhanger, the article was over. No more DPC talk. It brings a tear to my eye.