Physician Resilience

In 2020–2021, RCCbc’s Physician Resilience initiatives, led by Dr. Kirstie Overhill, moved forward on several initiatives to aid rural physicians’ health and resilience. Under the Choices in Practice and Parenting initiative, Dr. Overhill and Dr. Alan Ruddiman submitted a final report to the Joint Standing Committee on Rural Issues (JSC) on their review of the JSC’s parental leave policies. The report’s findings and recommendations will be of benefit to both rural physician parents and rural communities by helping enable parents to consolidate benefits, which, in turn, improves rural communities’ ability to recruit and retain physicians. The final phase of this extensive project, which began in 2019–2020, is underway and includes the development of a checklist of benefits and actions for prospective parents.

Throughout the year, Dr. Overhill also continued her work on a study and grant proposal on “advance preparation for adverse patient events”. This research explores common and severe psychological effects on physicians and other healthcare providers, which leads to decreased quality of care, anticipatory anxiety, difficulties in recruitment and retention to rural communities, and burn-out, which directly impairs patient care. Dr. Overhill expects that tackling this issue will lead to improved “quality of care” programming, and better psychological health for rural healthcare providers. Dr. Overhill presented this research to the RCCbc reference group this past year and has been working with a collaborative group to obtain research funding and connectivity to move this work forward. Publication is also underway. This research will also be presented by Dr. Overhill and Clara MacDonald (class of 2023 medical student from the University of Northern British Columbia) at the BC Rural Health Conference in May 2021.

Given that Dr. Overhill will retire from practice in the coming year, she will transition the Choices in Practice and Parenting initiative to Dr. Charuka Maheswaran.