Compassion Fatigue

What is part-time for a family doctor these days? My three half days in the clinic seeing patients and doing clinical supervision, becomes almost three full days when you add in the paperwork, chasing up consultants and results, trying to make sure that my vulnerable patients don't fall through the cracks.

Confronting disgust—both in ourselves and in our patients—is part of the job. Disgust doesn’t make us bad doctors. Denying it might.

‘The doctor went for lunch,’ an emergency nurse told me. And a patient got angry. I said, 'Would you work 10 hours without eating or drinking?'

Feel the challenge of finding words when there are no easy solutions—but also the quiet joy.

In medicine, we’re trained to stay rational and calm—but when illness strikes those we love, even the strongest clinical armor can fall away.

Filipino-Canadian nurse Glesy Banton-Victoria says she had planned to attend the Lapu Lapu Day street festival in Vancouver on Saturday but took a nap instead, exhausted by a funeral earlier in the day.

For Doctors’ Day—May 1—Dr. Alykhan Abdulla shares his latest poem on identity and the everyday reality of the profession.

In this case report from 20 years ago, career palliative care physician Dr. Romayne Gallagher looks back at how much we've learned about helping patients with existential suffering.