Physicians, nurses, and other healthcare professionals are leaving medicine in record numbers due in large part to exhaustion, disillusionment, and a profound loss of joy in their work.
In A Prescription for Burnout: Restorative Writing for Healthcare Professionals, Dr. Roy-Bornstein offers a powerful, science-backed remedy to burnout in the health care field: reflective writing. This guide is a structured, compassionate companion for those who want to stay in the profession they once loved and renew their sense of purpose.
Organized around the three dimensions of burnout identified by psychologist Christina Maslach—emotional exhaustion, cynicism, and lost efficacy—each chapter introduces a focused writing practice to help clinicians reconnect with their values, strengthen empathy, and rediscover meaning in their work.
Dr. Roy-Bornstein brings more than three decades of experience as a nurse, pediatrician, and narrative medicine educator to this deeply personal and practical guide. She knows firsthand how writing can transform grief, trauma, and professional disillusionment into clarity, self-awareness, and healing.
These accessible and insightful exercises are backed by scientific research and designed to be brief yet sustaining antidotes to the pace and pressures of modern health care.
Whether used privately or in groups, in early training or late-career reflection, A Prescription for Burnout offers clinicians not just strategies for surviving the system, but tools to reclaim their voice—and their vocation.
