Running a successful optometric practice takes a lot of work. And unfortunately, as the OD, many times you have to juggle both the business and clinical side of things while still making time for other aspects of your practice and your personal life. All of this work and pressure could lead a burnout which will impact the way you administer care to your patients, and it could strain relationships with friends and family.
So, how do you deal with burnout in your optometric practice? Today, we’ll share a few tips to prevent burnout so you can get back to the job you love.
Preventing Burnout in Your Optometric Practice
Take Breaks 
If you are seeing upwards of 15 patients a day, you don’t have a lot of time to focus on anything else. But not taking a break will increase stress, decrease focus, and open opportunities for costly errors. This is why you should work breaks into your patient schedule. Taking a short five-to-ten minute break can help you improve productivity when you come back refreshed and focused.
Disconnect
There are only so many hours in a day. And unfortunately, what doesn’t get done at the office ends up going home to get finished; putting a strain on your family. Disconnecting from your optometric practice when you’re not there will help strengthen relationships giving you the support you need when facing challenges.
Deligate Tasks
Workflow constraints such as calling labs and repetitive data entry can frustrate your patients and increase your workload and stress level. By reducing some of your responsibilities and eliminating repetitive data entry, you’ll gain more time to think strategically about your practice to enhance patient care.
To reduce workflow constraints and the chance for burnout, consider giving more of the pre-exam work to your tech to give you more time to focus on the patient. Additionally, you can use EHR and Practice Management software with clinical decision support that automatically populates diagnosis, treatments, orders, special testing, and patient education materials based on best practices all from a single annotation.
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