"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."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/inspired-life/wp/2015/08/20/the-innovative-stanford-program-thats-saving-emergency-room-doctors-from-burnout/
This is really brilliant and thoughtful and response policy making. It's sort of just being kind, and taking communal responsibility for burdens.
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.
Related: A high rate of suicide among doctors
(credit to KM)
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