Why it’s so important for health professionals to practice self-care

'How can it be,' said the fox, 'that you are able to cure others of their illnesses, but the signs of sickness can still be seen in your own face?'

Aesop’s fable of the frog and the fox echoes the proverb ‘physician, heal thyself’, and shares its moral of the need to attend to our own problems before those of others. It also makes a more literal point about the need for healthcare professionals to look after themselves.

Taking care of yourself does not simply set a positive example for your patients, or act as a sign of validity when you provide health advice. Health practitioners who are mentally and physically well may in fact provide better healthcare^1,2.

Medical practitioners don’t need mountains of evidence to be persuaded that their jobs can have negative effects on their wellbeing. Their personal experience has probably already made that obvious, given the incidence of burnout in doctors is somewhere between 20% to over 50%³.

This existing poor state of doctors’ wellbeing is itself a health crisis³.

Many interventions, focussed on individuals or structural and organisational systems, appear effective for reducing burnout in doctors⁴. However, wellbeing is not simply an absence of the stresses that contribute to burnout of healthcare providers; rather, it “includes mental, physical, social, and spiritual [quality of life] in both… work and personal lives”, “and the presence of positive wellbeing, including vigour and thriving states and behaviours beyond mere job satisfaction.”³

The World Medical Association⁵, Medical Board of Australia⁶ and Australian College of Nursing⁷ all recognise the importance of practitioners’ wellbeing for the provision of optimal health care, and they encourage health care providers to look after themselves.

What is self-care?

The World Health Organisation defines self-care as “the ability of individuals, families and communities to promote health, prevent disease, maintain health, and to cope with illness and disability with or without the support of a health-care provider.” Self-care practices nurture awareness, balance, flexibility, physical health, social support, and spirituality⁸.

How to practice self-care

An important thing that health practitioners can do collectively to improve their wellbeing is to help each other. Many general practitioners do not have their own GP⁹, and the majority probably self-diagnose or self-medicate¹⁰. Just like for the general public, health professionals’ regular visits to a GP promote preventive healthcare⁹. Regular visits to primary care providers can reduce burnout and improve quality of life¹¹.

There are useful resources to help you practice self-care, ranging from BeyondBlue’s Developing a workplace mental health strategy – A how-to guide for health services¹², to RACGP’s Keeping the Doctor Alive: A Self-Care Guidebook for Medical Practitioners¹³. RACGP provide the following list of self-care strategies in their Self-care and mental health resources for general practitioners¹⁴:

Not taking work home, where possible
Scheduling regular breaks
Being realistic with time and avoiding overcommitting
Developing and maintaining healthy therapeutic boundaries
Debriefing with colleagues regularly
Demanding a good work-life balance (and not seeing this as a sign of weakness)
Maintaining a healthy, balanced diet
Scheduling regular physical activity
Practising good sleep habits
Practising mindfulness
Participating in activities that bring personal joy
Making your relationships a priority and enjoying time with family and friends
Maintaining connection with culture, country and community
Establishing a relationship with an independent GP to assist you to manage your own health.

The wellbeing of health practitioners has been linked to their capacity for empathy and compassion — characteristics of any good health professional — leading to the suggestion that “physician wellbeing is the foundation of professionalism.”² In this context, health professionals would seem obligated to take care of themselves.