Relief Retreat for Health Care Provider Burnout

In 2018, Dr. Jackson left her academic career as a pain management physician at Vanderbilt, frustrated with the limitations of the expensive, inefficient, inaccessible and ineffective tools of our health care system for managing chronic pain. She left to create and lead retreats to help those with chronic pain learn to effectively heal without relying on this broken system . Her first two retreats, in 2017 and 2020 at Gray Bear Lodge in Tennessee, showed how life-changing this strategy could be for her patients.

But she hadn’t realized just how much SHE would benefit herself. Having left her job, in part (and in hindsight) related to classic symptoms of burnout, she found these same tools and techniques were just as effective for the providers treating those with chronic pain. In her case, this led to feelings of greater professional autonomy, agency, effectiveness, and satisfaction, while honing the skills for creating the work-life balance she’d always desired.

She’s now been approved by the Tennessee Medical Association to lead these retreats for burned out health care providers. Physicians, nurses, physicians assistants and physical therapists can all claim 30 hours of category 1 AMA PRA credit (including mandatory prescribing/opioid guideline education) for relaxing while learning evidence-based tools for relaxation! This retreat will have much of the same educational and experiential curriculum offered to patients with pain, allowing providers to understand and embody these non-pharmacologic tools for healing - both for their patients and for themselves.

Experiencing is believing - and providers will leave with a better idea of the spectrum of free, accessible, and effective resources available to their patients, along with the lived experience to foster greater empathy and empowerment for all involved in dealing with this very challenging area of medicine.