They don’t always get along. But they are both under siege by the bureaucracy of a failing health care system.

Guest op-ed by Theresa Brown and Stephen Bergman (a clinical faculty member at the U. of Pittsburgh School of Nursing and a professor of medicine at NYU) @ NYTimes.com, Dec. 31. My highlighting (because it's what I've experienced as the truth in accessing the system for self, family and friends the last couple of years.)

Broken, wasteful, inhuman, expensive, deadly. The problems with the American health care system, or non-system, are neither subtle nor unrecognized — especially by those of us doctors and nurses who actually provide the care. And yet we all too often feel the most helpless, seeing how much of the problem is driven by drug companies and hospital networks.

Too often, each profession sees the other as fighting separate battles, and sometimes against each other. Doctors blame nurses, and vice versa, for the failings of a system that punishes us all, and our patients.

Instead, the two of us are suggesting that nurses and doctors try something unusual. Let’s put our differences aside and work together to achieve real change, starting with a pernicious problem that drives so much of our mutual discontent: electronic health records.

The current system is pushing both doctors and nurses to the breaking point. Enough doctors in the United States commit suicide every year to fill two large medical school classes. A 2019 MedScape report found that 44 percent of physicians feel “burned out,” driving many to alcoholism and depression, or to leave the profession entirely.

Nurse suicides are not systematically measured and reported, but a 2017 study in England found a suicide rate among nurses that was 23 percent above the national average. Half of all nurses are considering leaving the profession, according to a 2017 study by RNnetwork.

Clinicians are notoriously overworked, but ask anyone on a hospital staff, and he or she will tell you that workloads have become heavier the last several years thanks almost entirely to the arrival of electronic health records — detailed reports about a patient’s medical history and care [....]

A new report from the National Academy of Medicine says that on average nurses and doctors spend 50 percent of their work day treating the screen, not the patient [....]