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- Page navigation anchor for Our ailing profession We need more than resilience and replenishmentOur ailing profession We need more than resilience and replenishmentValerie Iles’ response to my article 'Our ailing profession'. We need more than resilience and replenishment shows that my major points are unclear, to at least one reader.I certainly do not wish to attribute blame or victimhood, or encourage aggrieved despondency. My article, though, takes a very wide and long view and concludes that our professional healthcare problems now have the kind of nature and roots as to be cultural. Culture means that no one is to blame, yet we are all responsible.Neither do I wish to carelessly stymie colleagues’ ‘ways of improving [their] working lives and relationships’. However, it is important to be vigilant to the bigger picture. My article described a conference where dispirited and enervated young doctors were offered palliative suggestions of mindfulness, stress-management and enhanced breathing techniques. Yes, I accept that such devices may help us ‘get by’, but in no way address cardinally important bigger questions: how do we understand our rapidly increasing stress, distress, demoralisation and burnout? If we can understand, what can we do about it?The danger of merely propagating coping strategies is that they can serve to parry and obscure such questions about pathogenesis.In the last two decades I have seen how the 4Cs – competition, commodification, c...Show MoreCompeting Interests: None declared.
- Page navigation anchor for Our ailing professionOur ailing profession
After 25 years of working with clinicians and managers of many kinds, including leading the RCGP leadership programme for 5 years, I have come to the view that, all too often, GPs disempower themselves by responding to even the most valuable and practical of thoughts, ideas and opportunities with one or more of the following three responses:
1. the problem with that is
2. we're doing that already
3. (we shouldn't have to) it's their fault.Much of the value in many leadership programmes is in helping people develop alternative responses.
David Zigmond demonstrates all three in his description of how he undermined his colleagues as they tried to develop constructive ways of improving the working lives and experiences of those in primary care, and encouraging younger practitioners to remain and to flourish in their chosen career.
What a pity that he chose to send you his description, and that you chose to publish it. As a sympathetic observer I strongly suggest that challenging this attitude of impotent victimhood would do more to alleviate the recruitment problems in primary care than anything else.
Competing Interests: None declared.