Show Notes
Professor Dorothy Breen, founder of forDoctors.ie, a unique Irish coaching and mentoring service provided by doctors for doctors, is a Senior Lecturer in the Graduate School of Healthcare Management at the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland, where she specialises in leadership, quality improvement and patient safety. Aside from this work, she has been a consultant intensivist and anaesthesiologist at Cork University Hospital and the Royal Prince Alfred Hospital in Sydney for 16 years, during which time she has helped to introduce major national clinical and quality improvement initiatives like ‘safety huddles’, the Irish National Early Warning System, Schwartz Rounds, and After-Action Reviews, and the first Advanced Nurse Practitioner for the Deteriorating Patient. Dorothy also has a particular interest in simulation in education, and as well as being Director of Education at the celebrated ASSERT Simulation Centre in University College Cork.
In this podcast, Professor Breen brings immense warmth and wisdom to her analysis of the biggest challenges facing the Irish health service. She recalls her early years in Birmingham and Wexford, her visionary secondary school headmistress, and her training in Trinity College affiliated hospitals like the Meath and Adelaide, as well as Clonmel (where she benefited not just from a doctors’ res ‘with (possibly) the best views in Ireland’ but also from an a particularly intense clinical workload and a heroic consultant boss). She reflects on her training and consultant post in intensive care medicine in Sydney and the at-times-strikingly-generous level of medical resources there, when compared with those in Ireland, and she recalls the ups and downs of the transition back to a consultant post in a large Irish teaching hospital.
More recently, Professor Breen has been in the news as the founder of forDoctors.ie, a coaching and mentoring service provided by doctors for doctors. Having worked as a consultant in critical care and anaesthesiology for many years, she’d seen first-hand the distress caused by burnout within the medical profession. She was taken aback, however, to discover that very few doctors seek support to ease their job-related pressures. “For example, an Irish Medical Organisation survey in 2021 found that only 7 per cent of Irish doctors reach out for support, but over 60 per cent report feelings of burnout and exhaustion,” she says.
After considering various potential solutions to the issue, Professor Breen concluded that a leading cause of medics’ exhaustion was having to juggle multiple non-clinical tasks and roles, like practice management and team leadership, on top of looking after their patients. And doctors are expected to simply keep going without the sort of necessary training or on the job coaching that is often routine in business. Hence forDoctors.ie. which operates with a panel of medical coaches. “Doctors are high achievers by nature and want to give of their best,” she says, “however, they are currently facing enormous pressures in their lives with unprecedented demands on their time and services. Through action-focused coaching, doctors can recalibrate and take concrete steps towards their desired life and career goals, no matter what system they work in.”
This podcast is essential listening for anyone interested in critical care, education and quality in the Irish health system, and particularly those concerned with the issue of staff morale and medical leadership. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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