Survival Skills for GPs

Ruth Chambers

• Publisher: CRC Press
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781315348506
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Medical Theory, Practice & Reference

Survival Skills for GPs is an in-depth interactive personal coaching course that: Shows how you can survive the rigours of general practice, teaches you how to stay in control of your professional life, helps you learn to enjoy your career as a GP again, gives you the confidence and skills to develop your career. The first personal coaching course for GPs presented as an interactive workbook, which allows individual GPs, to progress from any stress in their lives through to job satisfaction and career development. It is applicable to all areas of life and shows comparisons to how other GPs' are doing.

MODULE 1
Detecting symptoms and causes of stress

Aims

The aims of Module 1 are:

1. To help GPs become more aware of the causes of stress in themselves and others.
2. To help GPs appreciate the effects of stress on themselves and others.
3. To help GPs realise the impact of adverse stress on their work.

Contents

What is stress?

Symptoms of stress

Exercise 1: What symptoms of stress are you suffering? (time = 20 mins)

Causes of stress

Exercise 2: Compare your causes of stress with other people’s views (time = 20 mins)

Exercise 3: Review your own personality type (time = 20 mins)

Exercise 4: Complete a series of daily logs to check whether you have identified all your causes of stress (time = 5 hours)

Effects of stress

Exercise 5: Draw your own stress performance curve (time = 15 mins)

Exercise 6: Compare the effects you perceive that stress has on you with what others think about themselves (time = 20 mins)

Exercise 7: Summarising sources and effects of stress for you (time = 40 mins)

Exercise 8: Are you experiencing too much stress? Do you need help? Making changes (time = 30 mins)

The total time to work through the module depends on the amount of time the reader spends reflecting on how the information in the module applies to him or her, before completing the exercises. The total time for which postgraduate education accreditation might be sought is nine hours (including time for reading and thinking and so long as 10 days’ worth of stress logs are completed).^*

Here’s what some GP participants said they had gained from undertaking the first Survival Skills for GPs programme:

The programme made me realise I am not alone and that there are changes I can make to improve some of my stress problems.’

‘Doing the Survival Skills programme yourself makes you think more than attending a course would.’

‘I had hoped that someone would know more than I did about dealing with stress but then it was reassuring to know that I did know as much as anyone else on the subject. It made me stop and consider the problems and organisation of the practice and realise that we are actually doing quite well.’

It was stimulating and enlightened sensitive issues.’

‘I enjoyed looking more closely at different aspects of my working life, how I feel about it, and what could be improved.’

‘Having to analyse my individual day was very helpful.’

‘Especially good parts were ... breaking down areas of stress into manageable bits ... took me in stages through my stressors ... could be tackled where and when wanted which was very helpful.’

‘The programme allowed me to think about the events and effects on everyone involved.’

‘It helped me to look at the good points of my work.’

‘It helps to understand stress and reactions of the body so that you can apply the understanding and minimise the effects.’

‘Useful to see how much of my stress equalled other GPs’, as so much of it is inherent in the job.’

‘Makes you think about your life.’

‘It encourages self-analysis and a “confessional” spirit to admit “sins” of self-destruction.’

‘Having to write down information ensures excellent concentration.’

‘I liked the effective content and approach to creating change in my life.’

What is Stress?

Stress is very difficult to define as it is such a vague word and everyone interprets it differently. Stress is equivalent to a person’s perception of the pressure upon them, or the ‘three way relationship between demands on a person, that person’s feelings about those demands and their ability to cope with those demands’.¹ So, in other words, a particular event or task can be very stressful for you one day but not on another, all depending on how you are feeling and what other pressures are being exerted on you.

In general, stress occurs in situations where the workload is high, control over the workload is limited and too little is available in the way of support or help. Many GPs would say they know when they’re feeling stressed even if they cannot specify exactly what stress is!

What is stress?

Is stress bad for you? It depends on how much stress you are under, how long it is applied for, whether you feel powerless to stand up to the stress or can overcome it. Certainly a moderate amount of stress is necessary to perform well at work and to maintain a zest for life; zero stress may lead to boredom whereas too much stress over too long a period will render you indecisive, exhausted or burnt out.

Are GPs ‘special cases’ in suffering from stress? Stress affects the whole of today’s society; doctors are not unique in reporting escalating levels of stress and low morale. In a typical week one million of the 24 million in the UK’s labour force took one day off work and up to 40% of absenteeism is thought to be due to mental or emotional problems. But in medicine, caring for others creates additional stresses from daily exposure to human distress and ill health, and the daily striving for perfection in relieving all suffering and never making mistakes.

Is stress an integral part of the job? It is important to distinguish between an occasional event or task that creates the highest levels of stress and those that cause the most frequent reports of stress. For example, an official complaint by a patient might cause terrific stress but hopefully rarely happens, whereas inappropriate requests for home visits may be a frequent cause of stress. A steady, relentless drip, drip, drip of stress-provoking situations may be just as likely to create a stressed doctor as a crisis event with monumental stress attached.

Surveys of doctors describe such a range of causes of stress that it seems as if the list of stressors is just the ingredients of daily life that make up the job description of a general practitioner! In other words, almost everything GPs do as part of their work has the potential to create stress in some people, depending on the quantity and quality of that source of pressure.

The sort of things that GPs describe most commonly as causing them to feel stressed are:

• demands of the job
• patients’ inappropriate expectations
• interruptions
• practice administration
• the conflict at the work-home interface between career and family
• interference with social life
• dealing with death and dying.

Female GPs experience more stress than their male colleagues from home visiting, fear of assault, finding a locum, the working environment, lack of emotional support at home and dealing with friends or relatives as patients.

The stressors that cause the highest levels of stress have been described by GPs as being:

• relationship conflicts with other doctors
• making mistakes
• conflict of career with family life
• fear of litigation
• work/demand overload.

The main way of identifying what provokes stress in you is to become more aware when symptoms of stress occur. Doctors are well known for denying that they themselves suffer stress or other ill-health symptoms, as they perceive such symptoms to be signs of weakness (or sometimes serious illness or even madness!). So the only way that you are going to understand how stress is affecting you, and through you others around you at work and home, is by identifying the sources, effects and consequent outcomes for yourself, and not ju...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Module 1 Detecting symptoms and causes of stress
• Module 2 Controlling stress in primary care
• Module 3 Encouraging assertiveness skills
• Module 4 Defining time management
• Module 5 Enhancing job satisfaction
• Module 6 Promoting career development