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It’s been a year!! Thank you to all you wonderful listeners that keep me motivated to keep posting. What a wild ride it’s been so far. Both Phil and I experienced some form of burnout over the course of the year and we discuss our strategies to deal with it in this episode. Burnout can easily happen to anyone, especially health care practitioners. Check out this interesting article published by the Canadian Physiotherapy Association (CPA) written by Leanne Loranger.
Happy New Year everyone!
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In my opinion, the notion of ‘burn-out’ cannot, nor should not be seperated from that of ‘change’. The profession of PT is on an ever-moving treadmill that represents its struggle with identity and maturity of its members. New members attempt to fill the void left by attrition, but cannot manage to capture the wisdom that is lost. That constant drain is never offset, and the profession is left scratching its head, wondering why it seems so unfulfilling. Not that helping people in need is unfulfilling, but it is the stress of the cognitive dissonance between the profession’s image management attempts, and the reality of poor and inconsistent clinical effect. The profession refuses to take responsibility for itself, for the burnout of its members, and instead it blames. Oh, the government is underfunding, or clients are poorly motivated and non-compliant. Always looking for a scapegoat, yet never accepting the reality that maybe the entire profession needs to re-evaluate its relationship with the truth. Stop buying into the uncritical advocacy messaging and start demanding that Canadian pt programs include critical thinking explicitly. The ego defences are so, so tired. You call it ‘burn-out’, I call it people frustrated by a profession that refuses to grow up, so they leave. The responsibility for ‘burn-out’ rests in the lap of the profession.
PT might benefit from its own therapy–psychotherapy, in order to hold up the mirror to the profession.