Talks

The Road Paved with Good Intentions: Are We Destroying Children’s Resilience?

Are adults quite unintentionally destroying children’s natural resilience and ability to learn how to negotiate the world before they enter into adulthood?Learn how to prepare children to be well adjusted and high functioning individuals in the real world.

Why Critical Care Doctors Should Not Challenge Religious Beliefs – SMACCUS Chicago

The ultimate goal in working with any patient and their family is connection.  This guarantees respect, integrity and ensures all communication is understood and goals are worked on together to optimise health outcomes. Connection is also a protective factor for patients and staff as it builds resilience and wellbeing.  Health professionals are often uncomfortable or annoyed if people of faith want to integrate their beliefs and hopes into medical conversations and outcomes.  Health professionals may perceive faith or religion as a threat or oppositional to science and the reality of the situation.  Ideally faith may be an additional resource for health professionals to use with paients and their families in times of crisis, uncertainty and end of life care.  There is a strong connection between faith and hope.  Prayer and crisis-orientated faith are common place in critical care medicine even for people who have been ambivalent or non-believers of faith in the past.  Challenging a person’s faith or belief in times of crisis may result in a severing of the therapeutic alliance or relationship with chi will have the opposite effect to what the health professional may desire.  People who ‘refuse’ to believe a diagnosis or prognosis in the hope of a miracle or divine intervention are vulnerable.  To enter into a dispute with religion is disrespectful, futile and unhelpful.  To learn more about someon’s beliefs and join in a genuine hope for a ‘miracle’ shows compassion, understanding and respect.  Nobody wants to suffer. Most of us are frightened by loss and illness.  Inviting and sitting comfortable with faith and prayer while also gently holding fears and preparing for the worst is a more powerful and honest way to work.

Where is the Love in Critical Care?

Does love have any place in critical care? If we love and care are we more vulnerable to burnout and compassion fatigue?  Will we be identified as weak leaders, too ‘soft’ for the area of critical care?  Are we supposed to love an environment full of carnage and suffering?  Are we meant to ‘love’ our colleagues and see our team as an extended family? Should we ‘love’ our patients or is that a ‘boundary crosser’?  Critical Care consistently looks internally to resolve the past and emerging problems when there is research across disciplines that will assist critical care environments to adapt to he changing landscape of ethics, new technologies, issues with team as and a need for leaders to be more than skilled clinicians.  Love and humanism hold the key.  Love, connection and compassion have much to teach us, it is time we learned to listen.S