Last week I presented my own research at a professional conference for the very first time. I have no idea yet about how many people were in attendance. Nevertheless, it was an enthralling experience despite the ‘black hole’ feeling of presenting virtually. I forgot how much I thrive off public speaking, and I am hungry and excited to build on this further. I only feel like I am warming up as I was immediately brewing with ideas of how to improve as soon as my stream ceased.
It’s only been a couple of months since I made the decision to adopt drBACKPACK as my professional identity + platform, and anointed myself with a mission to contribute to the social and emotional aspects of people’s lives. I’ve always dreamed big, and I’m ready to start small and let things evolve. The road is made by walking.
It’s easy to feel let down by the lack of response and interaction I’ve received since, but I am passionate and strongly believe in the value of my ideas. I felt it went well, and believe I’m at the beginning of something significant. I want to keep at it, and as long as someone took something away, that I made a positive difference with the awareness I was trying to raise, then I’m satisfied. For now I am just grateful to have had the opportunity to share.
TALK BIG
Yes, I speak with grandeur, and ambition, surrounding my work. There’s a couple of reasons for that. Firstly, it takes a lot of courage for me to step out on my own and launch my own platform. There’s great excitement and nervousness with this.
But the greater reason is the magnitude of my ideas, of what I want to achieve. They’re not all my ideas, but putting them together how I have and the proposals I am making are novel.
Challenges
In the world of prehospital care where Paramedics like me operate, I feel we’re stuck in a box. We have many challenges facing our practice but we keep looking for clinical solutions, more specifically, trying to build our medical knowledge. Yet it’s the equivalent of continuously throwing money at a problem hoping it will go away, because in my view, the challenges can be traced to not what we know, but more how we perform + practice what we know. In other words, stepping back and looking at solutions that don’t necessarily involve money. I’m calling for a change in approach.
Yes, this does involve enhancing our knowledge and understanding, but it’s surrounding the non-clinical aspects. Let’s look at the whole, complete picture of everything that influences, shapes and effects the care we provide at all stages: before, during and after each encounter.
Emotions
Which brings me to my emphasis on emotions. They play a huge role and are very important in the lives of the people we see, our patients, but also our own performance, but we don’t really talk about it despite it staring us in our face. In healthcare, there’s always talk about patient and clinical safety being the priority. Yet we also need to talk about practitioner safety, but moreover, practitioner wellbeing. If practitioners aren’t well and valued, how can they look after other people properly?? Review after review will identify what went wrong clinically, and they look at some descriptive, surface level solution but never get to the core of why things went wrong.
Wellbeing
As a concept, it is proliferating in our workplaces and it’s the new buzzword on the block. Yet like my professional self on the frontline, I think many are becoming disillusioned with it because of how much impetus is put on ‘self-care’ and shifting how we think about and perceive things. Plus ‘wellbeing activities’ keep getting relegated to non-working hours, with an implicit expectation for people to do things in their own time, away from work. THIS WILL BE INEFFECTIVE, and only make matters worse.
The Future
I don’t know what it looks like yet, the specific forms change could take, but I believe a new, holistic approach is required to address many of the clinical AND NON-CLINICAL challenges we experience to enhance our performance for the benefit of the people we care for, and ourselves as practitioners. One that accounts for individuals and systems, from behaviours to values, culture and policy. Otherwise, the status quo will continue to churn and burn practitioners who came into healthcare with the best of intentions but are in effect being abused.
drBACKPACK 