How does burnout impact racial responsiveness for White healthcare & mental health providers?
In other words, how does burnout influence how you behave around race as a White provider?
The image that comes to mind for me is showing up for trainings on race with exhausted and over-scheduled providers (i.e., getting knocks on the door to respond to patients’ needs). Although most participants shared their appreciation for the material, I wonder how they will continue the learning that we started that day
The commitment to racial equity for most participants feels real, and so does the commitment to their patient care, and maybe even intellectually the commitment to their own self-care. Yes, burnt out White providers de-prioritizing their racial identity development is a privilege and a self-sustaining mechanism of oppression in healthcare.
I remember as an early doctoral trainee talking to other clinicians who graduated from my program about oppressive dynamics I was witnessing and I remember so vividly them saying, “Sometimes I don’t even see it any more, it’s just the water I swim in.”
Now that it’s been years since I was a trainee (and been through several bouts of clinical burnout myself), in hindsight I underestimated how many of my supervisors (there were many) were burnt out and overwhelmed.
How do we address the way clinical burnout impairs White racial identity development so that providers can become more racially responsive in their care?
What can providers do on an individual level to understand their relationship between burnout and doing better with race, privilege and power?
What can systems & organizations do to address clinical burnout, racial non-responsiveness, & the relationship between the two?