Burning Out on the COVID-19 Front Lines | Dhaval Desai, MD

During the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, the phrase “Healthcare Heroes” echoed through hospital walls and city streets. For many people, this felt like an overdue acknowledgment of the difficult and important work that healthcare professionals carried out during the most devastating healthcare crisis the world had seen in a century. But this phrase can also be problematic, romanticizing the sacrifices of individual clinicians without addressing the systemic failures that put them at risk, overlooking the mental health struggles they experienced, and undermining healthcare environments that encourage reflection about respect and duty. 

Our guest on this episode is Dhaval Desai, MD, a hospitalist at Emory Healthcare in Georgia and the author of the book Burning Out on the Covid Front Lines: A Doctor's Memoir of Fatherhood, Race, and Perseverance in the Pandemic (2023), in which he details his personal narrative as a healthcare leader and frontline physician fighting to hold his hospital together. 

Over the course of our conversation, Dr. Desai shares why he decided to train in both internal medicine and pediatrics, how his experiences caring for his ailing father revealed the flaws of our healthcare systems, the nerve-wracking first few months of the COVID-19 pandemic, his own struggles as a leader, healer, father, and husband during a time of deep uncertainty, how we can all better connect with patients through even a few moments of shared humanity amid our busy days, and more.

In this episode, you’ll hear about: 

2:36 - Dr. Desai’s path to medicine

5:05 - How a Med-Peds residency differs from other medical residency tracks 

8:06 - How Dr. Desai’s personal experiences have shaped his approach to patient advocacy 

11:53 - Dr. Desai’s personal and professional life leading up to the COVID-19 pandemic

18:46 - Dr. Desai’s opinion on why it is important for leaders to be able to express emotion 

24:53 - How Dr. Desai used his leadership role to help his staff navigate the emotional turmoil of the pandemic experience 

28:32 - Moments when Dr. Desai suffered heavily from burnout

34:47 - Stories of the isolating effects of COVID-19 in the ER 

39:53 - Our society’s support of healthcare workers

46:19 - Advice for young clinicians on ensuring humanity stays central to their work 

Dr. Dhaval Desai can be found on Instagram at @doctordesaimd and on X/Twitter @DrDesaiMDx.

In this episode, we discussed the New York Times article “I Couldn’t Do Anything: The Virus and an E.R. Doctor’s Suicide” 

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