A Must Read

I want to make sure everyone reads this amazing comment that someone sent in response to my latest post on substack. This eloquent summary of the situation says more than in a short space than I could say in thousands of words. Read it, but don’t weep, do something. Call a Congressional representative, object, get active if you are not already.

It is entitled All the Clinicians Are Quitting

All the clinicians are quitting. Not all at once— not with trumpets, not with a final diagnosis written across the sky. One leaves on Friday. One stops taking new patients. One answers the last message and closes the chart. Another says, “I can’t do this anymore,” and the sentence disappears into Human Resources. The nurses leave quietly. The therapists burn out slowly. The physicians discover that medicine has become a room full of doors that no longer open. There are fewer hands to hold the frightened, fewer eyes to notice what the numbers miss, fewer voices saying, Something isn’t right here. And still the system counts. Appointments. Encounters. Productivity. Vacancies. Wait times. Everything becomes a number except the person who was supposed to be there. A patient waits for someone who resigned. A family calls for someone who transferred. A veteran sits in a waiting room where the chair is occupied but the clinician is gone. The record remains. The name remains. The diagnosis remains. Only the relationship has disappeared. And that may be the quietest failure of all: not that medicine has stopped, but that the people who made medicine human are leaving it. One resignation does not look like a collapse. Neither does another. But eventually the institution discovers that capacity is not a spreadsheet. It is a person who answers the phone. A person who remembers the story. A person who notices the silence. A person who stays. And when all the clinicians are quitting, the question is no longer Why are they leaving? The question becomes: Who will be left to see the people who cannot afford to disappear?