Work and Life Balance “If We Are Not Happy Both in Work and out of Work, We Cannot Provide Happiness to Others”

[摘要] Like most of my colleagues, I spent many years studying to pass medical school, residency, and fellowship. However, during all that time I never had an official lecture on work–life balance. Unofficially, too, it seemed like a taboo to talk about our personal life during our early training. We were told, “always patient care comes first,” and “we had a hard residency as well, and this is training.” “Resident” in the Cambridge dictionary means “the person who lives in a place,” and literally, we as residents were covering the hospital 24/7 in my home country of Japan. The society took it for granted that we would sacrifice our personal lives for our professional lives. How many times did we miss our kids’ concerts, or parents’ day in the school? Now, although trainees in the U.S. are protected with duty-hour rules, we as attending physicians still sometimes spend 36 h at a time in the hospital.

[学科分类] 儿科学

[关键词] work–life balance;pediatric critical care medicine;happiness;burnout;professional;other industries