Grief on the Front Lines

Reckoning with Trauma, Grief, and Humanity in Modern Medicine

By: Rachel Jones

Narrated by: Henriette Zoutomou

Length: 9 hrs and 11 mins

Publisher's summary

For listeners of Atul Gawande and Siddhartha Mukherjee—a timely, vital exploration of the burnout, grief, depression, and trauma that America’s healthcare system engenders among doctors, nurses, and medical workers.

Practicing medicine is traumatic: coping with the death of a patient, sharing a life-changing diagnosis, grieving futility in the face of a no-win situation. The emotional burden placed on doctors, nurses, and other healthcare practitioners is profound...and yet their suffering is often displaced, dismissed, or unrecognized.

Here, Rachel Jones breaks the silence, daring to imagine a future where every healthcare worker is provided with the right tools to process grief, the space to integrate trauma, and—most importantly—the knowledge that they’re not alone. Drawing from the latest research and more than 100 interviews with healthcare professionals across different specialties, backgrounds, and institutions, Jones identifies how US medicine fails its workers—and how it can do better.

Speaking with urgency about the systemic shortcomings that contribute to widespread depression, burnout, suicide, and PTSD among physicians and nurses—a culture of stoicism, the pressure of 80-hour workweeks—Grief on the Front Lines shares the stories of everyday healthcare heroes and offers a glimpse into the educational programs, retreats, therapeutic offerings, and peer support networks already building a hopeful new culture of medicine that cares for its own.

©2022 Rachel Jones (P)2022 North Atlantic Books

Critic reviews

"This book—birthed during the pandemic of the century—is filled with painful truths about the American healthcare system that sound the clarion call for change." —JESSICA ZITTER, MD, author of Extreme Measures

"Urgent, powerful, healing. US healthcare has reached a crisis point where those who care for others need care for themselves to recover from epidemic levels of burnout. Grief on the Front Lines shows how that caring work can and must be done." —THERESA BROWN, PhD, RN, author of the New York Times best seller The Shift

"Grief on the Front Lines is a clarion call for a more compassionate approach to medicine—not only for our patients, but for ourselves as medical professionals." —ANTHONY MAZZARELLI, MD, Co-president and CEO of Cooper University Health Care and co-author of Compassionomics

Good book

Good information. A number of stories are repeated multiple times. Other than that it is well written food for thought. As a clinician Licensed Social Worker employed at a hospital, this book is detailed in addressing issues.