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…hell out of that mine and into fresh air.  Right?  Your work is never just medical, though your expertise in the breath of this field is astounding. It is always medical and a something else.  That is your exquisite gift.  In isolation, filling out a form, making a call, listening, looking in an ear when you know it’s fine, reviewing again that your thyroid is normal – but your boss is a real @sshole, doesn’t seem heroic, does it?  Wrong.  The bea…

…. Christine Hanna Christine Hanna is a family and emergency physician, the medical director/chief of the Division of emergency medicine at Quinte Health Care, and an assistant professor in the Department of Family Medicine at Queen’s University. Whether you are a medical trainee, allied health professional or attending physician, you’ll at one time or another have heard someone say, “They’re just a family doctor.” This phrase has survived time and…

I graduated from medical school 25yrs ago and recently left my family and maternity practice because of “burn out.” Since leaving my practice, I have been reflecting on some of the factors that led to my burnout. When I was training, I was taught the importance of maintaining “professional distance.” I donned my white coat and worked very hard to contain the tears as I saw patients who had cancer, who had just lost a baby, who were leaving an abu…

I. See. You. “For medical reasons this patient will be unable to attend work. This will be reassessed in two weeks” Sometimes it was two, or three, sometimes four weeks. Often the notes got re-written. A new date set. Extensions in time. Healing slowing down the 24 hours of a clock, to intervals that weren’t sufficient to heal a broken mind. Covid anxiety breaking those who had been holding themselves together with tape but now found with people…

…or my patients the way they deserved. High-functioning, well-funded family medical clinics are the backbone of our health system, but the old family doctor payment model made this impossible to achieve.  B.C.’s new family doctor payment model has kept me in the game.   The new Longitudinal Family Physician (LFP) Payment Model, introduced February 2023, makes things much simpler. I’m not spending as much time on billing and my staff don’t have to k…

…e LFP plan was introduced is the renewed interest in family medicine among medical students. Just the week the payment model was announced (on Halloween, as the announcement was so significant that every part of that day has been etched in my memory in technicolour), one of my rotation students, who had been sitting on the fence about going into family medicine, told me they were finally sure. They had been worried about whether it made financial…