C ON F E RE N CE RE PORT
Report on Tomorrow’s Doctors: a symposium of medical teachers Professor David Peters Director, Westminster Centre for Resilience, University of Westminster
The ways students adapt to the demands of medical training may shape careerlong habits and lifestyles. Some students become ill or unable to continue; on qualifying many doctors say they intend to take up jobs outside our under-resourced health service. Ought medical schools to be preparing students better for the frontline and the often ignored emotional impact of doctors’ working lives? This symposium of medical teachers assembled to share the challenges of developing a ‘resiliencecurriculum’ to protect the future of safe and sustainable (and satisfying) professional practice.
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Professional resilience used to be seen primarily as a characteristic of people who are relatively stress-proof and so less susceptible to burnout. It was formerly assumed too that these qualities were predetermined. More recently, it has been recognised that people can learn to be more resilient, that positive adaptation to professional challenges is possible, and that certain skills and attitudes enable doctors to flourish in their work. For the last three years the Westminster Centre for Resilience team has been developing resilience workshops for NHS staff. Our encounters with GPs and foundation doctors has left us in no doubt of the need to be resilient in both ways: throughout long and often stressful careers doctors are expected to function well and with grace and make life or death decisions under pressure; and in medical practice they encounter extraordinary levels of emotion and suffering which, whether or not they realise it, they will inevitably be affected by. If we define resilience as the ability to make appropriate decisions while retaining emotional awareness and empathy, and to achieve this without too high a personal cost, resilience would seem to be a very desirable quality in a doctor; perhaps even a necessary one. The evidence that empathic patient-centred doctors are also more
resilient supports the potential for positive cycles of satisfied patients and fulfilled doctors. In order for this to come about however, medical education may need to evolve as, crucially, the way healthcare is conceived and organised undergoes radical change in the face of the 21st century’s demands.
The big problem The GMC, aware that students and qualified doctors are experiencing increasing levels of workplace stress and burnout, has urged medical schools to include personal resilience in their professional development programmes. With these issues in mind we convened a symposium of medical school colleagues involved with teaching about resilience, professional development or self-care, to begin asking where, how well and with what outcomes the GMC’s instruction is being carried out. As far as we can establish this was the first meeting of UK medical educators to specifically address the topic of student resilience and selfcare. Teachers from 28 of the UK’s 34 medical schools came to the meeting at the University of Westminster in Central London in June 2016. Sixty participants took part in a format that included presentations, panels, and large group facilitated conversations. World Café and Open Space processes
© Journal of holistic healthcare
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Volume 13 Issue 2 Summer/Autumn 2016
