Physicians for Physicians - Supporting Doctors and Their Families

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We’ve all experienced or witnessed burnout in a colleague or ourselves. It can be so insidious- growing slowly until eventually hitting breaking point. After recognising burnout in their own lives, this physician couple from Canada have made it their mission to support the well being physicians, trainees and their families. Introducing Sara and Colin. – Andrew

What is your medical background?

We met in medical school at the University of Western Ontario in London, Ontario, Canada in 1994. We were in the couples match and completed our residencies in Calgary, Alberta, Canada – Colin in Radiology and Sara in Family Medicine. Since then, Colin has been a partner in two different Radiology groups and Sara has done a variety of clinical and non-clinical work. We have moved across the country of Canada a couple of times, and a year ago, moved to Vancouver Island to change our lifestyle and work completely.

What is your side gig?

Our side gig is Physicians For Physicians – a platform to advocate for physician and medical trainee well-being. When we first began a few years ago, it began as an online course platform that we created with our website developer – it took a long time to create and proved to be a very expensive endeavor. This is a perfect place to answer

Where did the idea come from and what gave you the confidence to start?

Sara had a wellness blog for 5 years and during that time became very interested in physician wellness, especially as she started to see signs of burnout in Colin. We knew that we wanted to do more to help our colleagues and families since we knew what an impact burnout had on our own family. We also knew we wanted to do something online and became interested in the idea of an online business. It hasn’t blossomed into a business so to speak in terms of revenue, but we are letting it grow organically at this point instead of forcing it to be what we want. The confidence came from having already created and published online, as well as actively engaging on Twitter on our own accounts prior to starting our @docs4docs account.

What have been your biggest wins?

All the wins are from community – knowing that our message and voice resonates with individuals are wins for us. We are the real people behind the brand and consider it a true win when someone reaches out to us to connect, share their story or look for ideas.

What inspires you to keep pushing through?

We aren’t going to pretend we haven’t thought of putting our time and energy elsewhere along the way, however, we continue to see evidence of forward momentum which is very motivating. We know issues such as burnout, mental illness and suicide are pressing concerns among the medical community and we know that we have experience, both personal and professional, along with genuine interest in finding solutions one physician at a time.

What have been your biggest challenges?

Build it and they will come almost never works in the online world. We hadn’t built much of a community beforehand, and therefore, didn’t know what our audience wanted or needed. We’ve since evolved to focus on the social part, in particular through Twitter, as well as creating digital products and weekly newsletters. Eventually, we want to expand the community aspect but we haven’t sorted out what that will look like yet.

What do you wish you knew before you started?

We don’t really wish anything was different because we are firm believers that you learn more from your mistakes and missteps than from your successes. Likely we needed to lose time and money to know where to pivot and to realize what this is all about. Our mission to support the wellbeing of physicians, trainees and their families is clear and is our guiding principle.

What’s your favourite quote?

We love quotes and use them every week in our newsletters. We used this one recently and it really resonates with what we are about. We are trying to take action – enough talking about the problem.