Efforts to address burnout in healthcare will remain limited unless systemic changes in workplace culture accompany existing wellbeing support services, a conference on physician health has heard.

Practical programmes offering support for health and wellbeing must be integrated into teaching curriculums and workplaces if long-held stigmas and attitudes towards illness and disability among medical professionals are to be challenged.

The call to action was delivered to attendees at the International Conference on Physician Health by Wales-based GP-trainee Georgie Budd (pictured above), as part of a presentation on the role of leadership and culture in supporting staff wellbeing within health services.

Dr Budd, who in 2024 was part of a study into the use of Enhanced Stress-Resilience Training (ESRT) among medical Students, told the conference that while specific support programmes like ESRT were important, such initiatives in isolation were not enough to drive ‘wider cultural change’.

She said that while the five-week ESRT programme delivered tangible benefits such as ‘increased psychological flexibility’ among partaking students, the success of such initiatives could be blunted when offered as a stand-alone service rather than as core component of medical training.

She said: ‘Stress [on its own] doesn’t equal burnout, it is stress without the adequate resources that equals burnout.

‘[While] we’ve been fairly good at looking at those inadequate resources and going “well here’s something that can help. Here’s a well-being initiative, here’s some additional training” … we’re offering these well-being initiatives, and yet we’re not meaningfully changing the amount of burnout that we have out there. 

‘What [some] students felt was that [though offering ESRT] we were putting the responsibility back on them to do yet another thing to deal with their burnout.

‘Because it was an add-on and not integrated into the curriculum, they couldn't see that the university actually gave a damn about their well-being, and they wanted the university to acknowledge that actually engaging in this kind of thing is what makes them a better doctor.’

Dr Budd told the conference that while she had personally benefited from mindfulness-based support that she received following a road traffic accident that left her disabled, she was also acutely aware of how cultural attitudes within medicine meant that doctors were often ‘quite bad’ at self-compassion.

She added that by offering support resources integrated within medical schools and workplaces, she believed that detrimental beliefs among doctors such as presenteeism, ‘sick-shaming’ and a refusal to be vulnerable could increasingly be challenged and overcome.

She said: ‘It’s a beautiful thing to have a calling and a vocation, but if you use up all of yourself, there will be nothing left for the next patient.

‘Something that I try and instil in all the students that I look after is that doctors’ well-being is patient well-being. You cannot have one without the other, and I do think it is slowly becoming something that the collective consciousness is more aware of

‘Yes, we need these well-being initiatives, but we need the culture and the system to change to support them. And in order to fight for that system change, we all need to be looking after ourselves.’