The wounded healer - International practitioner health summit, London, June 27-28, 2024
In late June 2024 I attended the International Practitioner Health Summit at the Royal College of General Practitioners (RCGP) venue in London, the UK under the overarching theme “The Wounded Healer: A New Hope for Workforce Wellbeing and Solutions for the future”.
As a Counselling Psychologist with an interest in medical education and clinician wellbeing, the summit provided a rich convergence of front-line reflections, evidence-led research and practical workshops focusing on how health professionals experience, process, and act upon their own emotional and professional selves.
Key Themes and Highlights
Several keynote sessions stood out. For example, Dr Benji Waterhouse (Consultant Psychiatrist and best-selling author) brough humour and human insight to the topic of “You Don’t have to Be Mad to Work Here”, emphasising that vulnerability and resilience are not opposites. One of the most powerful presences was the Doctors in Distress Charity, which continues to shine light on the mental health crisis among healthcare professionals. Their work highlights the stark reality that physician suicide remains an increasing problem, driven by chronic stress, emotional isolation, and stigma around seeking help. Sustainable change requires cultural transformation: embedding openness, access to confidential and safe support services, compassion, and reflective practice across all levels of medical roles, training and leadership.
Presenting in the medical education stream allowed me to situate my qualitative IPA research on how palliative care physicians experience grief in the hospice context, within broader themes of clinician wellbeing and professional formation. Often medical curricula and workplace culture emphasise technical competency, the the lived emotional experiences of physicians, for example over patient death, and especially those working in end-of-life care, receive far less attention. Professional grief is not simply a personal inefficiency to be overcome, but a meaningful human response that if unacknowledged, may contribute to moral distress, burnout or attrition. And on the contrary, if professional grief expriences are recognised, this can contribute to integrating vulnerability into the professional identity and physicians becoming more compassionate doctors.
Other sessions focused on reflective groups for junior doctors, neurodiversity, moral injury, and creative self-care, e.g., “Writing for Self-expression” workshop, among others.
Key Recommendations for Future Medical Education
Embed Structured Reflective Practice: Medical education should include facilitated reflective groups (as the event itself showed) where physicians regularly engage with their emotional responses, losses, and professional meaning.
Normalise Professional Grief Across All Specialties: Though my work focuses on palliative care physicians, grief is relevant for all physicians facing patient deaths, losses, and/or role transitions. Training should frame grief not as a pathology but as part of the human life-cycle, professional experiences and professional ‘competences’.
Cultivate Safe Supervisory Cultures: Educators and supervisors must foster environments where physicians can discuss emotional experience without stigma, integrate peer support, and link to wellbeing resources proactively.
Concluding Reflections
The summit reaffirmed that medical education and workplace culture are evolving: technical excellence remains necessary, but sustainable practice demands human-centred approaches. My research contributes to this evolution by bringing professional grief into view and by advocating for reflective practice as integral to medical education and daily work. It is not an optional extra. In doing so, we hold space for physician’s humanity, enhance workforce wellbeing and ultimately support more compassionate care for patients and families.