Called to Care Spotlight: What If Caring More Prevents Burnout?
What if one of healthcare’s most accepted ideas about burnout is backwards?
Clinicians are often taught, formally or informally, that caring too deeply creates vulnerability. Keep some distance. Don't get too attached. Protect yourself.
In this episode, Heidi Jannenga joins Larry Benz for a much broader conversation about what actually keeps people in healthcare.
Heidi is the founder of WebPT and the Rizing Tide Foundation, an organization supporting future physical therapists through scholarships, education, networking, and mentorship. Her work offers a unique view into the barriers facing first-generation and underrepresented DPT students—not only getting into the profession, but building sustainable careers once they arrive.
The conversation moves from representation and student debt to mentorship, workforce retention, administrative burden, AI, burnout, and the role human connection still plays in a technology-heavy healthcare system.
The central idea: getting people into healthcare is only the beginning. Keeping them requires human infrastructure.
Key ideas:
• Why financial support solves only part of the access problem
• How representation creates an aspirational path into physical therapy
• Why first-generation clinicians may carry family obligations alongside student debt
• Why good mentorship includes both clinical development and life navigation
• How employers can accidentally reduce someone to the reason they were recruited
• Why recruiting more clinicians cannot compensate indefinitely for poor retention
• What twenty years of healthcare technology have—and haven't—fixed
• Why AI should remove administrative noise and return attention to the patient
• The difference between healthy boundaries and emotional detachment
• Why deeply engaged clinicians may actually build more sustainable careers
• How trust in a clinician can strengthen a patient's belief in their own recovery
• Why the people around you can sometimes believe in your potential before you do
The revised edition of "Called to Care" expands Larry's work around burnout, AI, virtual care, positive psychology, empathy, and the human factors that influence clinical outcomes.
Proceeds from the new edition support the Rizing Tide Foundation.
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