Burnout Is Not Tiredness

The thirty-first patient of the day is a four-year-old with a fever, on his mother’s lap, in a consulting room in a private hospital in Kochi. Dr Fathima has the history, has the temperature, has looked in both ears. The mother is describing the cough. She is frightened and is giving too much detail, the way frightened mothers do, and Fathima is nodding and typing, and it is only when the mother stops mid-sentence that she realises she has not once looked at the woman’s face.

She looks up. She says the right things. The child is fine; it is viral; here is what to watch for. The mother thanks her three times. The consultation took six minutes, which is one minute under the figure the hospital’s dashboard regards as optimal.