Resilience
Barnsley VTS Trainers’ Workshop18 March 2015
Why is ‘Resilience’ needed?
Dodgy raw material
According to the RCGP, the personality of doctors is characterised by:
• Compulsivity• Perfectionism• Self-criticism
Many are already nutsGPs who feel themselves ‘stressed’ – 48%
Hospital Anxiety & Depression (HAD) scale:Anxiety, borderline or worse – 55%Depression, borderline or worse – 27%
GP suicide (SMR) 162 (M) 193 (F)Wives of GPs 400
GPs who have sought help because of work-related stress – 22%
Is Anxiety Inevitable in General Practice?
Very probably:
• Uncertainty • Professional duty vs. demands
(& life/work conflict)• Vulnerable patients• Juggling the ‘Stakeholders’• Was the NHS ever not in crisis?
Coping with Uncertainty
Sources of Uncertainty:
• Priorities• Diagnosis• Management• Review• GP factors• Structural factors• ‘How am I driving?’ - isolation
How we work• Hypothetico-deductive problem
solving, ‘guess and test’• Uncertainty of evidence• Too much and too little evidence• Uncertainty of biology, ‘Cartesian dualism’
Key points
• Uncertainty is inevitable in medical practice, and particularly in general practice
• Uncertainty generates anxiety• Strategies to combat anxiety you might
use in your patients also apply to you
Take-home message (it’s not all doom and gloom)
Your ability to cope with uncertainty will improve with: • time, • experience, • arrogance.