This podcast explores the motivating factors for a physician experiencing “Joy in Practice”, a topic that will also be addressed in an upcoming issue of the Southern Medical Journal. Join Matthew Du, a third-year medical student at the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine as he details how this study used a bit different approach to the topic of satisfaction with one’s practice; instead of addressing the commonly studied concept of “burn-out,” he and his coauthors, Drs. Zhoy Jung Tak and John Yoon, utilized the novel concept of why physicians experience joy in practice. The authors’ study utilized validated physician well-being measures, and tested the concept of joy in practice with certain intrinsic and extrinsic factors. The authors believe that there is promise in addressing joy in practice as a marker of physician well-being, and offer primary and secondary outcomes from the study as insightful into the perspectives from a national physician survey.

Learning Objectives:

Upon completion of this activity, learners should be able to:

• Know the philosophical and practical differences between “burn-out” and “Joy in Practice” as they relate to physician satisfaction with their care of patients.
• Compare the responses from the survey in the categories of high life satisfaction, high life meaning, sense of calling, personally rewarding hours per day.
• Consider why extrinsic factors such as specialty selection, setting of one’s practice, and annual practice income were not significantly associated with joy in practice in most analyses.
• Perform an introspective and thoughtful evaluation of your own level of joy in practice, and what you believe may be the elements that have, and continue to have, contributed to the joy you experience in your practice.