UNDERSTANDING STRESS IN DOCTORS FAMILIES
To our children Tony and Natalie
Understanding Stress in Doctors
Families
USHA R. ROUT
Manchester Metropolitan University, Manchester
JAYA K. ROUT
Kearsley Medical Centre, Kearsley, Bolton
First published 2000 by Ashgate Publishing
Reissued 2018 by Routledge
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Copyright Usha R. Rout and Jaya K. Rout 2000
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ISBN 13: 978-1-138-72744-1 (hbk)
ISBN 13: 978-1-315-19088-4 (ebk)
Contents
The National Health Service is undergoing enormous changes, which has led to many health care workers experiencing pressures beyond their control and ability to cope. The doctors and nurses are particularly under strain from change fatigue in a Service which is constantly changing and demanding more and different procedures and accountability. The role of the doctor, whether the GP or hospital doctor, has altered beyond all recognition from just a decade ago, and continues to face new demands and challenges. The long working hours, the changing perceptions of the doctor by the general public and the spillover of work into family life is taking its toll on this group of dedicated practitioners (as it is on their nursing colleagues as well). The doctors, their colleagues and support staff are not the only ones to be affected by these pressures, the families of doctors and nurses also have to take the brunt of this stress.
This book is a welcome addition to the literature in highlighting the issues confronting not only the doctors themselves but also the families of doctors, their day to day experiences and how they cope or dont cope. Understanding this process and the issues involved can only help us as a community to ensure that we support and help this most valuable human asset, as well as appreciating what this job can do to significant others as well. Congratulations to the authors for their sightful and important book.
Professor Cary L. Cooper, BUPA Professor of Organizational Psychology and Health at the University of Manchester Institute of Science & Technology
This book is the product of our work on doctors and their families. The interview data that forms its substance includes more than 120 doctors, their spouses and their children that we have interviewed over 12 years of our research. We have organised this book in five chapters beginning with medical students, junior doctors and consultants stress. focuses on the experiences of non-doctor spouses and childrens point of view. The non-doctor spouses include housewives, working wives of doctors and husbands of lady doctors. The final chapter reviews issues raised by the doctors, their spouses and their children. Suggestions are given to problems to different groups and outlines some individual and organisational stress management strategies.
We have changed the names and identifying information of the doctors and their family members in the case studies and quotations so that anonymity is protected. If the names of individuals in this book bear any similarity it is purely accidental. The views presented in this book are ours.
This book is aimed at medical students, hospital doctors and their spouses, general practitioners and their spouses, other health care professionals and students in medicine, social sciences and allied health professions. Also this book can be of value to the counsellors helping doctors and their families suffering from emotional problems.
Although we have attempted to present an objective view in this book it is inevitable that the views of the authors are likely to emerge as we are a husband and wife team, a general practitioner and a University lecturer in Psychology, whose life very much revolves around medicine and the study of stress in it. We hope that this book will stimulate further debate on doctors and their families in what we believe is an area of growing importance in medicine.
Note: The term he is often used only for convenience.
Our special thanks to Carolyn Kagan and John Cavil for their invaluable comments and suggestions on the first book draft; Prodeepta Das and Iain McLean for proof reading the script; Saima, Rahila and Sarah (Ushas PhD students) for their help in literature search, and Marilyn for her secretarial help. It has only been possible to write this book due to the cooperation of all those general practitioners, hospital consultants, junior doctors, their spouses and their children who gave their valuable time to share their experiences. Finally, we wish to thank our children Tony and Natalie for their patience while writing this book.
Thanks to Kluwer Academic Publishers for giving permission to use the material from Stress and General Practitioners (1993).
Usha R. Rout is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Psychology and Speech Pathology at the Manchester Metropolitan University in Manchester. She received her PhD from UMIST and is an Associate Fellow of the British Psychological Society. Dr Rout has authored two books and published several research articles on the subjects of stress and the medical profession, stress and health of health care professionals, and women and work. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, Royal Society of Health and Royal Society of Medicine.
Dr Jaya K. Rout is a general practitioner at Kearsley Medical Centre in Bolton. He is co-author of Stress and General Practitioners (Kluwer Academic Publishers). He has published several scholarly papers on stress in health care professionals and depression. He lectures to doctors and other health care professionals and conducts stress management workshops.
The first part of this chapter provides a brief review of literature on the physical health, mental health, alcohol consumption, cigarette smoking, drug abuse and suicide among doctors. The second part of this chapter covers literatures on stress among hospital doctors and qualitative data from the interview with junior doctors and consultants.
Stress and physical illness
There are several physical diseases which are caused by stress or aggravated by persistent stress. Some of the common stress disorders are described in this chapter. Psychosomatic disorders are the diseases which are believed to have psychological factors as their causative agents. However, psychological factors are linked to specific psychosomatic diseases such as ulcers, rheumatoid arthritis, asthma and headaches (Friedman and Booth-Kewley, 1987). Stomach ulcer is often caused by increased acid secretion into the stomach called hyperacidity. Hyperacidity is thought to be partly associated with psychosocial factors, such as hostility, anxiety and rage (Weiss, 1984).
