Hillary Ferguson explores burnout syndrome and moral distress in intensive care practitioners.
“I am looking at the levels of increased exhaustion, cynicism, and inefficacy that overcome health providers who are faced with the harsh reality of working on an intensive care unit.”
As my term with Dalhousie’s OpenThink initiative comes to a close, I wanted to take this opportunity to go full Brene Brown and allow myself to be a bit vulnerable with you all. I want to talk briefly about my own personal reasons for investing my time and energy into the research that I do […]
When I listen to nurses tell their stories, I am often reminded of the practice of lingchi, or the ‘Death by a Thousand Cuts.’ This practice was a gruesome form of torture thought to originate in China, and involves exactly what it sounds like, multiple cuts made into the flesh of a person until death […]
If you have been following my blogs, it is no mystery that I am preoccupied with the emotional aspects of healthcare. Throughout much of my writing I refer to the ways in which we can better care for patients, care for staff, and give care towards each other in medicine. What I want to talk […]
“It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change” – Charles Darwin Since the COVID pandemic hit in December of 2019 in Wuhan, China, the face of healthcare has changed forever. The public can no longer ignore the unsafe conditions that medical staff […]
“You can educate people and you can tell them about it, but until they experience it, they won’t know…you have to have been out there in the trenches to know what reality is. It’s real that you are a major decision maker. It’s not real that the doctor is always right.” – Quote from Catherine […]
Ethical dilemmas arise in healthcare every day; they can even occur multiple times within the span of a few hours. As a bioethics student and a fellow healthcare worker, some days I find myself taking stock of ethical challenges throughout the entirety of my shift. Many of these challenges are the same old issues I […]
Investing emotionally in others can be both rewarding and exhausting. I find that even if I have an incredibly positive day full of laughter and moments of deep human connection the sheer volume of personal interactions can leave me feeling worn-out. Researchers Powers & Myers write on the concept of “emotional labour” and the ways […]
“One of the central tasks for people interested in care is to change the overall public value associated with care. When our public values and priorities reflect the role that care actually plays in our lives, our world will be organized quite differently” – Joan Tronto. A few years ago, I was lucky to attend […]
The term ‘burnout’ is said to be quite intuitive as it conjures an immediate sense of what is meant by its expression. Taken literally, burnout is the act of smothering a fire by removing the necessary resources required for it to burn. In contrast, burnout experienced by humans is often a very slow and cumulative […]
Medicine is no stranger to discomfort. Whether you are a writhing patient waking up from surgery, a practitioner who must don more gear to re-enter a COVID room, or a tired resident whose pager is endlessly buzzing, you are not always pleased about your situation. It is no mystery to the general public (since the […]
