Welcome to the Journey

Our healthcare community is hurting. Recent surveys indicate that 38% of healthcare workers report anxiety and depression, 43% experience work overload, 49% report burnout, and 1 in 10 medical students report feeling suicidal ideation. As a healthcare worker, you’ve probably been given a list of self-care tips to help you be more resilient. We’re challenging the healthcare system to think about this differently. How do we make changes in the healthcare environment and culture, and also protect ourselves from suffering burnout?

Welcome to The Burnout Antidote podcast, where we honor real stories from healthcare workers who share their experiences with burnout and moral distress in their own words. Our hosts, Amy Pearlman, MSW, LICSW, and Paul Deger, MA, LPC, PT, reflect on these stories, explore tools to cultivate community, and share strategies to create healthier systems that are less likely to induce moral distress. This episode features our special guest, Dr. Thekla Brumder Ross, an expert in burnout, moral distress, and self-compassion, who helps us embark on this journey. 

“We just haven't been taught in our culture how to name our suffering, and when we name it, we tame it. We can actually decrease it by getting it out of our bodies, out of our mouths, out of our brains by just saying it out loud. ” - Dr. Thekla Brumder Ross

Meet the Hosts and Experts:

Amy Pearlman, MSW, LICSW 

Amy Pearlman is a quintessential social worker with a strong desire to improve healthcare outcomes. She believes that the best way to support the largest number of people is through engaging the community of providers and allies. She has transitioned between provider and payer settings over the course of her career to develop her clinical skills and maximize her empathy of provider experience, with the mission of aligning perspectives around a shared focus and goal to improve healthcare for individuals and families.  Her clinical expertise is in crisis intervention, community based care, and clinical program design.  Amy believes that healthcare is strongly tied to the health of care providers and is proud to support the healthcare system in this way.

Paul Deger, MA, LPC, PT

Paul Deger is a mindfulness-based intervention specialist. He has been in the healthcare delivery world for 35 years - first as a physical therapist, then as a licensed professional counselor. Paul has worked in a broad range of healthcare environments - inpatient, outpatient, ER and home-based. He also has served as a trainer for health care providers - covering clinical and self-care topics. Paul has seen - and experienced provider burnout - and has found sustainable ways forward. A life-long learner, he seeks out ways to exemplify being human and professional, accessing head and heart, balancing self-care and caring for others. To learn more about Paul, click here.

Thekla Brumder Ross, PsyD

Thekla Brumder Ross, PsyD is a clinical psychologist, a certified ambassador of compassion, a national leader of addiction medicine, a workforce wellbeing consultant and she strengthens human resources for abortion providers. In her 14 years at Kaiser Permanente, Thekla led large-scale dissemination, implementation, and sustainability of evidence-based practices and policies in addiction medicine, SBIRT and primary care behavioral health integration. Notably, she developed the Kaiser Permanente National Harm Reduction Strategy and acted as a subject matter expert in patient activation and provider wellbeing. Today you can find Thekla acting as a strategic advisor to NIAAA, serving on the National Drug Abuse Treatment Clinical Trials Network Community Representative Council, providing guidance to organizations in product, content, and strategy design, as well as co