Dr. Jane Philpott on life after politics and finding her purpose

Q: You’ve decided you’re not going to do a second term as dean of Queen’s Health Sciences. Do you have thoughts about what you might want to do next?I don’t have a definitive plan in mind, but I’ve always been interested in trying to improve access to primary care. As I wrote the book, I became more and more determined that this needs to happen, that Canada needs to do this work. Because I’ve had a chance to look at healthcare from a bunch of different perspectives, I feel like I can put some energy behind this that might be helpful, so I will be looking for opportunities. I’m not sure exactly what that will turn out to be, but once I’m finished at Queen’s, I’d like to spend the rest of my career focused on trying to deliver on 100% access to primary care.Q: You really have not spoken about your faith much before but did in this book and you use that to talk about the social aspects for health that are so important like people having belonging, meaning and purpose. Maybe give a sense of why you felt like doing that now?Health is such a big topic, right? As I think I suggest in the book, you could have other entire sections on digital health and planetary health. One could go on and on. I had decided I was going to do the clinical and the social determinants and the political, but there was a sense that something was missing, and it was about mental wellness. But then I thought about this mental wellness continuum framework that I had heard from indigenous peoples, and I thought, “You know what? We need to talk about mental health in the sense of the soul or the spirit and open up that discourse amongst ourselves,” partly because indigenous teachings are so strong in that area.And, to your point earlier, a lot of what ails us both as individuals but also as a society is that we’ve kind of forgotten to talk about how much we need one another and how much we need to have belonging and purpose in our lives. I thought, “You know what? This is a great opportunity to introduce this whole sphere of health to make it not a scary, taboo topic, and to say, ‘Let’s talk about what really matters to each other. Let’s talk about where do you find your hope,’ and make it an OK thing for us to say, ‘that’s part of health, too.’”Q: You wrote that you came to realize that you have a purpose, which you said is about improving systems—whether clinical, educational or political—to improve people’s health. And you found that if the work you were doing was aligned with that you can just pile more and more tasks on and be totally happy. Now lots of doctors are struggling with burnout and I wonder how you feel having a purpose helps around that?Clearly, lots of your readers are struggling with burnout. Some of that comes in the form of what people now tend to refer to as moral distress. Part of moral distress really is this sense of: “Things are broken all around me and I can’t fix them.” People get quite despairing when you feel like you can’t control anything.What I found over time was (the value of reflecting on): What is it that I really want to accomplish in the world? I might not be able to change the entire healthcare system, but there are little things around me that I can change that I can improve. So, what are those proximal system issues that I could actually make a difference in? I found that as I started to do that, as I started to teach medical students, as I volunteered to be the family health organization lead, that I actually found joy in doing more work but changing my circumstances.Recognizing what your purpose is (thinking) what can you do to work toward that purpose in small ways is part of how we will combat burnout—not to take a helpless approach but to realize, especially for physicians, circumstances are never entirely beyond our control. We can often do more than we realized to improve them.Q: How did you come to find your purpose?It was something I discovered gradually and probably couldn’t have put into words until in retrospect I realized, “Oh, actually that’s. . . .” I started to get joy, I started to get over my burnout when I started to do more teaching and administrative work. I recognized that that was actually a healing for me to be able to exercise my purpose by taking on tasks that would allow me to advance that purpose.Q: Your husband recognizes there is a “restlessness” in you, you wrote, so he isn’t surprised when you do new things professionally. Your time as a federal cabinet minister ended for the reasons it did. (Dr. Philpott stood with Jody Wilson-Raybould when she was attorney general over the SNC-Lavalin affair; they were both booted from caucus.) Do you think you would have stayed in politics long term if things hadn’t gone that way that they did?Well, it’s always hard to think through all the what-ifs. I mean, I intended to stay in politics longer at that time, and circumstances didn’t work out that way. There’s part of me that thinks things happened for a reason. And this time in the after-politics period I feel like has been, first of all, great to learn about what the medical education sector is like in a much more deep way. Even just the work of reflecting on the book, I feel like a lot of pieces came together for me. I didn’t want to leave politics when I did, but maybe I needed to do that in order to understand things that will prepare me for the rest of my journey.Q: Do you think about what retirement would be like for you?I am at this point not picturing retiring anytime soon. It’s nice to get a little bit of time off periodically to be with my family, but I love the opportunities of trying to leave the world in a slightly better position than it might’ve been if I hadn’t tried to make it better. I will just keep working away at the opportunities that come my way. As long as my mind and body allow me to, I’m going to keep working.

Dr. Jane Philpott on life after politics and finding her purpose

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