Healthy doctors make happy doctors, says visiting professor
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Updated: October 13, 2009 3:41 PM
Derek Puddester remembers the punishing training he went through to become a doctor.
Although it was an exciting time, he also recalls the day he was too tired to work.
With two residents absent from his team, Puddester was working back-to-back 36-hour shifts. By the fourth week he knew he couldn’t do it anymore.
“I just looked at my staff and said ‘I am so exhausted, I have to go to sleep, I don’t think I’m safe to work.’” Instead of supporting him, a colleague chastised him, saying that was nonsense and they needed him.
Puddester walked away. For months he felt he was a failure, until another colleague took him aside to say he’d done the right thing. Ten years later, Puddester teaches doctors in training at the University of Ottawa how to avoid similar situations and how to take care of themselves.
In Victoria recently Puddester launched a guidebook, CanMeds Physician Health Guide: A Practical Handbook for Physician Health and Well-being on how physicians can stay healthy. With submissions from doctors across the country, the manual presents practical solutions to issues like managing fatigue, sustaining personal relationships or dealing with on-the-job ethical problems.
“The goal is to make Canadian health care as safe for patients as possible,” Puddester said, adding the old-fashioned thinking that doctors should just soldier on doesn’t work. “There are lots who just can’t suck it up or they suck it up and actually don’t learn anything about they experience they’ve just had.”
Studies show nearly 50 per cent of Canadian doctors are in advanced stages of burnout. Puddester said we can’t afford to lose any more doctors, adding that efforts must be made to “keep them on their game.”
Simple things like teaching physicians how to efficiently hand over case files at the end of shifts can result in time saved.
That time can be spent decompressing after tough days, rather than making those tough days longer, he said.
“They’re simple ideas, but simple things often aren’t done. Sometimes we disrespect the simple because we’re looking for complexity.”
Andrew Clarke is the executive director of a provincial association dedicated to keeping doctors healthy.
Clarke said the release of the handbook is timely. “So much of the curriculum in medical training emphasizes how important it is to always consider your patients first, which is true,” he said. “But you can extend that too far and not look after yourself and then you can get into trouble.”
vmoreau@saanichnews.com
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