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.