Tag: serenity

Social Media – are you a user?

Nearly everyone knows Facebook, it and other social media platforms have grown to be an integral part of life in the modern world. With nearly 2 billion active users monthly (Facebook) – a large portion of the human race is engaged in some way or another on Social Media. Doctors and health professionals being no exception. For me personally I’ve gone through ups and downs on using Facebook and other […]

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Resilience for Doctors – Bouncing back

Resilience is the latest buzzword,  especially in context of Mental Health for Doctors (#MH4Docs). But what does it really mean, and why is there such resentment against the term from some groups? Definition of Resilience (English Oxford Dictionary) Noun : The capacity to recover quickly from difficulties; toughness. The ability of a substance or object to spring back into shape; elasticity. In relation to Mental Health (American Psychological Association) : […]

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Mandatory Reporting – Protecting or Harming?

Mandatory reporting is a hot topic of the moment. The increased awareness on mental health for doctors, twitter campaigns #MH4Docs and #Socks4Docs, the loss of great doctors due to mental health issues – have all contributed to raising the debate again on mandatory reporting . At the recent Business for doctors conference, this was one of the main concerns for doctors attending the workshops on Burnout and the one on Wellness for […]

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#Socks4Docs – Mental Health of Doctors

Today June 1st is #Socks4Docs or #CrazySocks4Docs day. This is an idea to promote #MH4Docs This is an idea started by Dr Geoff Toogood @gdtoogood who was the first to suggest #CrazySocks4Docs. It was also promoted and expanded upon by Dr.Eric Levi who’s done some great blog posts recently discussing the mental health issues of doctors. This has taken off on Twitter, and a large number of doctors have taken up the […]

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Self-Value and Self Worth as a Doctor

Over the last few posts on this Blog we’ve talked about a few different things, but you might have noticed a trend in some of the struggles we as Doctors or health professionals face. It often comes down to ourselves – or more precisely how we value ourselves. So for today’s post we’re going to look at self-worth. What does self-worth mean? Just what it says, it means valuing yourself. […]

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Fear & Guilt Behind the Stethoscope

Despite the common perception of a white coat, stethoscope, fancy car, and smooth, calm intelligence – today’s doctor is mainly a walking ball of fear and guilt. What’s more he or she has been trained to be this way. As an Asian, the guilt trip was laid on early in life, along with a dash of fear. “If you don’t study, you will fail” … “all that we’ve sacrificed for […]

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Wellness – Beyond the Buzzword

With the growing trend of burnout in doctors, one of the things that has been identified as a solution is improving “Wellness” or self-care in doctors. Most medical colleges and boards have started to recognize what has been an important part of corporate culture for some time. That looking after the physician’s wellness can lead to better performance from Doctors, and reduced incidents of medical errors and increased patient satisfaction. […]

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Burnout in Doctors – are you Toast?

There is  increasing public perception and commentary that there are systemic failures in Doctors, and that they will or are making mistakes. Regulatory bodies, medical boards, and government try to combat this by looking at systems to identify those who may pose a risk to public safety. The markers that they use are often based around burnout – substance abuse, mental or physical health, increased medical errors, and reduced patient […]

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Facing Difficulties (Part 1)

Welcome back to Serenity. We’ve talked here about looking after ourselves, finding our identity and last time some simple rules to help get us through life. Today I’d like to talk about facing difficulties. Throughout our lives – personal and working, we will face difficulties and challenges to our happiness and balance of well being. How should we deal with these challenges? You might think that this is just common […]

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Finding our Identity

Welcome back to Serenity for the 2nd post, if you read the first post I talked about some of the difficulties that we as GPs face in looking after ourselves and why we are so bad at it. One of the main things is that we find if difficult to separate the identity of ourselves as a doctor from ourselves as a person – I thought I’d explore that a […]

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