6 Reflection Questions to Renew Purpose and Passion in Healthcare
I have been noticing a number of health professionals sharing that they feel burned out when dealing with the demands of patient care. They seem to be losing the vigor that they possessed when they first entered dietetics, nursing, or medicine. What has happened, and how can they turn this around? Rather than being a source of satisfaction, clients begin to drain them.
Practitioners of all types can learn something by exploring their own professional development and the road map they carry inside that guides their care of the patient and themselves. We need to apply a wider lens to patient care and our role in providing it to understand the complexities that impact our patients and ourselves. We are more than what we know, and the care we provide needs to be based on more than the evidence. Clinicians are humans who often do not know how to replenish their energies or provide deeper growth and development for themselves and their patients. Healing comes from two people interacting.
When we function at our best as providers, we must acknowledge that during patient interactions, we encounter what Pulchalski, speaking to physicians (2012), describes as sacred alchemy: “that space” where “something greater than ourselves is occurring during parts of the clinical encounter that are poignant or perhaps moving.”[i] She continues, stating that care is not unidirectional from practitioner/[dietitian] to client but bi-directional. Both can be transformed.
What we do as providers is more than a job. It is a vocation based on who we are and what we become as much as what we know. We must develop our sense of vocation/calling, human qualities, awareness of our deepest selves, and that sense of Sacred.
Pulchalski (2012) suggests practitioners understand themselves, what gives their life meaning, and what recharges them. Hence, they know how to care for their human spirit “to seek opportunities for personal transformation from our encounters with our patients.” Quoting from a chaplain at Cape Breton Regional Hospital, Neil McKenna[ii], Pulchalski suggests dietitians/practitioners ask themselves regularly six questions:
- What gives meaning to my life?
- What beliefs and values are most important in guiding my life?
- What does religion mean to me?
- What does spirituality mean to me?
- How would a serious, life-threatening illness change the way I find meaning, values, or beliefs in life?
- What spiritual resources do I bring to my work as a nurse, counselor, clinician [or dietitian]?
When we become more alert and aware of what moves, inspires and empowers us as clinicians, we become able to have daily spiritual practices that renew us and allow us to show up with greater vigor and compassion when we care for others. This “daily awareness, gratitude, and celebration of our vocation, our calling, are perhaps the secret of restoration and re-creation.”
[i] Puchalski C, Guenther M, Restoration and Re-creation: Spirituality in the Lives of Healthcare Professionals, Curr Opin Support Palliat Care, 2012, 7: 254-258
[ii]Bryson KA, Spirituality, Meaning, and Transcendence, Palliat Support Care, 2004, 2: 321-328