Practising self care for physicians

It is impossible to help others without helping oneself first. This is the guiding lesson from the second episode of the "Our Health" series, where Dr. Ginevra Mills examines the most important lessons that she's learned about self care during her career. Transcript: Episode 2 – Practicing Self Care For Physicians Misia Lerska: Hello, welcome to our health, the medical post’s new three part series on physician wellness. My name is Misia Lerska, and I'm a visual storyteller. When we think about physician wellness, it's vital to notice why physicians experience burnout more than other professions. Being a doctor is defined by helping others but it's impossible to help others without helping yourself first. I'm excited to introduce my second guest on our health Dr. Ginevra Mills, Dr. Mills is a clinical fellow at the Reproductive Center of McGill University's Help Center. As she begins her career, she's understanding more than ever, why her self care matters, and how this relates specifically, now that she is a doctor. She's compassionate, impressive and inspiring. And I cannot wait to share some of her story with you. Without further ado, here's Dr. Ginevra Mills. Question: What is your definition and relationship with self care? Ginevra Mills: I think that self care is about finding what you feel like you can do for yourself to take care of your own well being and making time and prioritizing that time to do those things. And often, when you're busy, when you're in training, and you feel like everything else, like your training, schedule or if you're in a surgical specialty, studying, and then any other responsibilities you have outside of that always seem to take top priority. And I think that, for me, I found that I had to make sure that even if it was just one thing I did a day or one thing I did a week that it was in the top priority as well. It wasn't just the last thing that I did did if I had a little bit of time Question: How do you carve time out for yourself? It's been a challenge to find the right way to do it, especially at different stages of my medical career. Before I started medical school, I was actually really good at doing this. I suffered from a lot of anxiety early on in my life. And so as part of managing that I became really good at self care. And then when I got into medical school, and I had a baby at the same time, it almost sort of fell apart. And I stopped prioritizing that. And I realized very quickly that it didn't work for me. And I was really struggling. So I found that making a schedule about things that I needed to do for me, I found that massage was really important for me, partly because I had some MSK injuries that sort of made my physical well being difficult to manage. And it also gave me time to have some mental time to myself. It was an hour a week that I could sort of just set aside and, and I knew it was mine. And once I realized that that was something that worked for me, I put it into my schedule, and I did it. It was like an appointment, and I couldn't miss it. And it was almost like making an appointment with myself for my own self care. And of course over time, that gets more and more difficult. And sometimes it's harder to make that appointment or to not cancel that appointment. Question: What do you wish that you could tell yourself at the beginning of your studies in relation to self care? Just a piece of advice is that it's okay to give yourself what you need. The beginning of medical school, it's a huge transition, you're, you're thrown in with a bunch of new people with your who are going to be your colleagues really for the rest of your life. You're competing with them at the same time because of the limited residency spots that are available, especially if you're interested in a competitive specialty. And there's just a lot of work and a lot of information that you need to assimilate and most of it is self directed. And it's easy to get lost in the party's of medical school, it's easy to get lost in feeling like you have to get everything right all the time. And I think I would have wanted to tell myself that you don't have to be perfect at all of it. And in order to be closer to perfect if that's what your goal is, you do need to take care of yourself. Question: What do you wish had been different about the way that medical school prepared you for becoming a doctor? That medical school and medical training in general would focus on just the holistic approach to the person in terms of what makes them a good doctor. When you're applying to medical school, they want people to be really well rounded and they want them to have all of this volunteer experience and that varied interests and they're looking for people who aren't just in sciences, they want people to have a lot of outside sort of world experience. But then you get into medical school and it's almost like those things don't matter anymore and you can't. You feel like you can't keep up with the things that you want to do before. And it would be really great if there could be more of an emphasis on keeping that whole well rounded person all the way through their medical education, because it just, if you lay that down early on, like I said before, once you become staff, hopefully, you've already found a way to prioritize your yourself, your care and everything that goes along with that. Question: What should be changed in how doctors are treated compared to others in the service industry? So, one of the things that I've seen a lot of and hurt a lot of recently, and I think it's gotten worse since the pandemic started, was doctors feeling like the general public or patients really just take advantage of the fact they're there and almost forget that they're human. And I think that virtual medicine has really made that worse, it's almost like doctors are supposed to be available all the time, like, can you have evening and weekend appointments. And if you don't have evening and weekend appointments, why not? And when doctors go away on vacation or take time off or take sick time, it's like patients get really irritated or upset that their doctor is not available for them. And you wouldn't expect that from any other type of service industry. Like if you're, you know, if you called a plumber, and the plumber wasn't available, you just take the next available appointment. And that's what you get, and you don't really complain or call them out or tell them that they're bad, they're bad at their job because they're not available right when you need them. And similarly, I think that the fact that in Canada, we have universal health care patients, and people aren't paying for their health care out of their pocket. And there's this idea that the doctors are overpaid, or they're greedy, or they want lots of money or make lots of money when maybe they don't. And patients almost when there's uninsured services, or when they're expected to respect the fact that, you know, the bring only one, you know, make one appointment per issue that you have is that they think that doctors are just trying to charge more money. And if you go back again to other service industries, like you know, if you call your lawyer, they give you a bill for what services they provide, and every other service, you know, you go to the vet and they provide you with a bill for the services they provide. And you pay it because that's the expectation. And so I think just this is sort of unique to our healthcare system and that there's a disconnect between what the patient is getting, what they're giving for that service, and what the physician is getting or giving for the amount of work that they do. So I think all of these things contribute to physician burnout and it makes it even more difficult for us to take care of ourselves because we want to take care of our patients. This is why we went into medicine. We care about our patients, we care about their well being and it is important to us to be a good doctor. So when patients are demanding of us that we know, don't don't take vacation or aren't available to them after hours when they feel like they should be, where does that leave us?

Practising self care for physicians

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