Making a difference to doctors’ wellbeing

The state of doctors’ wellbeing is an alarming issue. More than half of doctors are experiencing burnout and the majority are over-stressed.

A survey of New Zealand doctors showed that over 50% of doctors right now are experiencing symptoms of burnout and over half would not choose medicine as a career again.

Studies show that burnout in doctors causes depersonalisation, imposter syndrome, emotional disconnection with our patients, and in turn leads to increases in major medical errors.

Despite ‘first, do no harm’ underpinning who we are as doctors, the way we are being as doctors is harming our patients.

Dr Sam Hazledine started medical recruitment agency Medrecruit with the goal to help doctors match up what kind of job and lifestyle they wanted, with hospitals and clinics that would be a good fit for them. His outcome wasn’t just to place doctors into a job like all the other agencies do; he wanted to help doctors have an exceptional life. And to him, that means having an exceptional career, providing exceptional care, and having an equally exceptional and gratifying life outside of the hospital or clinic by addressing doctor wellbeing.

Why Medworld was founded?

Here at Medrecruit, we believe that doctors living their best lives change people’s worlds, so in 2015 we set up Medworld to celebrate exceptional doctors and to share their knowledge to help other doctors.

Medworld has four core objectives:

•Research into stress in doctors

Medworld has conducted research that tied stress to depersonalisation to increases in major medical errors. This was ground-breaking, as it created the leverage needed to change the profession.

• Advocacy for doctors’ wellbeing

Medworld successfully lobbied the World Medical Association to amend the Declaration of Geneva, the value-set of doctors worldwide, to include doctor health. Using this as a starting point we continue to lobby for the wellbeing of our profession.

• Development of evidence-based methods to help doctors thrive

Medworld has created an online program that it provides free to doctors to help master the eight evidence-based skills the research identified are necessary. We also provide a wellbeing conference and comprehensive wellbeing program to Royal Colleges.

•Celebration of doctors

Medworld is a community to share exceptional doctors’ messages and rekindle doctors’ love of medicine. This is a place to feel good about being a doctor.

What does Medworld do?

It’s our purpose to help doctors and healthcare organisations discover what exceptional means to them, and then provide opportunities, tools and support to help them close the gap between where they are now and where they want to be.

We share the stories of doctors who are doing exceptional things in their communities. We provide videos, podcasts and articles that will help you discover new ways of working and perform better than ever before.