After recently agreeing to become the practice Wellbeing Champion, I was immediately struck with the conundrum of – if I am tasked with looking after my colleagues’ wellbeing, should I be in a pretty good place myself?
Don’t get my wrong, I’m excited to apply myself to helping my peers as well as patients; and what I’m hoping is that the training I receive will be equally as useful to me personally as it should be for the role itself. So why do we need this? We can all have a good chat at work and get on mostly very well as a whole practice – how would this make a difference and is it worth it?
I personally struggle to tell anyone that I am feeling anxious about mistakes or carrying out new procedures.
Veterinary surgeons in the UK are three to four times more likely than the general population to die by suicide (Platt et al., 2010). A shocking and real fact that many of us know about when choosing to go into the profession, but adamantly tell ourselves that we’re resilient and tough enough to manage. However, the truth of it is that no one knows how they will cope in practice once they leave vet school.
Stress can amount from so many avenues:
- Client pressure to ‘fix’ their animal
- Time pressure
- Pressure from yourself – no self-forgiveness for small mistakes or performance anxiety
- Conflict or disagreement with other members of staff
- Handling clients in high emotional states
- Dangerous scenarios risking injury
- Lack of sleep
- Client complaints
- Long hours, few breaks
The list is endless and although a lot of members of staff will happily share gripes with overtime or missed lunch breaks, a few points on the list are hard to admit to other people – often let alone to yourself! I for a fact know, I personally struggle to tell anyone that I am feeling anxious about mistakes or carrying out new procedures.
There is an underlying culture of ‘man up and get on with it’, and often you do learn quickly in scenarios that are out of your comfort zone and you don’t feel totally prepared for. But if more colleagues could put their hand up and say that they’re a bit nervous, a) more members of staff would feel happier doing so again in the future, and b) their learning experience is going to be so much more positive and with a lot less risk than if going without support.
It’s just a case of re-aligning that culture… probably easier said than done and it has to start somewhere.
A fantastic organisation is VetLife, who are doing really good work to bring this to the forefront of the industry’s priority list. They have some great resources as well as a 24/7 helpline available. Some articles on the website include – dealing with perfectionism, mindfulness, dealing with complaints, and compassion fatigue and more. All hugely relevant to every veterinary professional working in clinical practice.
I urge you to check out the fantastic work and resources at Vet Life.
So with all this in mind, I will return back to this topic after some of the wellbeing training to see how I can improve myself, as well and develop the role and conversation in my practice.
ThisVetCan 