Coaching Doctors For many years I have worked as a psychologist. Often my clients have been experiencing a health crisis, so I have listened to lots of stories about health care, many of which have been distressing and disappointing. Eleven years ago, I had my own close encounter with the health system, when my husband Tim was diagnosed with cancer. There have been enough lessons from this experience to fill a proverbial book. Unfortunately, after four years of the cancer rollercoaster, Tim passed away. One of the outcomes from my personal experience and by witnessing other people’s stories, has been that I have spent the last four years coaching health professionals, specifically doctors. Health executives in the C-suite regularly use coaching and whilst doctors and nurses in America and the UK have been using coaching for several years, it is a new concept for most health professionals, in Australia. Most health professionals have learnt and refined their skills on the job, watching others perform the same tasks, via mentoring and occasionally through formal supervision.
All health professions in Australia are mandated through the regulatory body, AHPRA to attend regular training and updates to maintain their technical skills and registration.
Contrary to what we might expect, there is minimal training and specific processes that teach doctors people skills. Doctors are qualified through medical school, internships and specialty training, ensuring they are extremely resilient people; they have to be to keep going. The process of becoming a doctor can be harrowing for many and can take 10 - 15 years or more of formal training, before the doctor is fully accredited in their specific area of care. Now I am generalizing when I say that as a result of this long, arduous and costly training process, doctors mostly consider themselves tough and feel like they have proven themselves. To reach accreditation they justifiably feel like they have earnt it. Some doctors do experience persistent imposter syndrome, in spite of the evidence that they have reached their goal through years of effort. Healthcare is a technical business and is delivered by a complex system. At the heart of it though it is a people’s business, delivered by people, for people. This means care exists in the relationships between caregiver and patient, between teams of colleagues and during the interactions with communities and families. Skills in relationship building, effective communication, emotional intelligence, navigating complex systems, accessing information and interpreting it from many different sources, allow the health care system to operate effectively.
Where these skills are lacking health care is suboptimal, medical errors are higher and patients are placed at risk, conflict occurs more often between all the parties, providers of care burnout and their own health suffers seriously. This suboptimal healthcare is not able to meet the needs of the community it seeks to serve. Medical school focuses on anatomy, pharmacology, differential diagnosis and risk assessment. Emotional intelligence, communication and those other ‘soft skills’ need to be learnt incidentally. In my limited experience, it is a totally random event if a doctor has learnt these skills at medical school or in the early years of their career. It certainly has not actively been given a priority and embedded into the curriculum. There has been some significant work to teach mindfulness skills to medical students, most notably led by A/Prof. Craig Hassed at Monash University.
