Professional Wellbeing

Course Overview

This Course acknowledges the importance of professional wellbeing and will provide practical tips to enhance your wellbeing at work, including how to recognise signs of burnout.

Topics

• How to achieve a work-life balance,
• What is professional burnout?
• Creating a personal plan for your professional wellbeing.

Need

Being employed in a fulfilling job can have psychological benefits, flowing onto the physical benefits of productive health. Conversely, under-employment and stressful working conditions can have adverse impacts on a person’s health. Professional burnout is becoming a very common phenomenon in today’s employment environments and needs to be addressed to protect both the patient and clinician.

Given that we engage in work practices and environments that have an impact on our health and mental wellbeing, there is a need to understand the concept of work-life balance and professional wellbeing. Strategies to overcome some of these environmental, interpersonal and social challenges must be explored as work demands increase.

Purpose

The purpose of this Course is to reinforce the impact that professional burnout can have on the care we provide to patients and our personal lives and to provide strategies to increase professional wellbeing.

Learning Outcomes

• Use reflection and new knowledge to gain insight into factors that may cause personal stress and burnout.
• Be familiar with the signs and symptoms of professional burnout in order to recognise early in yourself.
• Be able to implement a personal plan to create and maintain professional wellbeing over the next 12 months.

Target Audience

This Course is relevant to all registered nurses and other healthcare professionals, regardless of the practice setting, given the prevalent nature of professional burnout and the importance of professional wellbeing.

Disclosure

No conflict of interest exists for anyone in the position to control content for this activity. Wherever possible, generic or non-proprietary names of medications or products have been used.

Educator

Karen-Ann Clarke

Dr Karen-Ann Clarke is a registered nurse and a specialised mental health nurse with 30 years’ experience of working with individuals and families impacted by the experience of mental illness. Using a feminist narrative methodology, her PhD research explored the way that women diagnosed with depression made decisions and meanings about receiving electroconvulsive therapy. As a lecturer in nursing at USC, Karen-Ann is responsible for the coordination of mental health curricula across multiple undergraduate and postgraduate programs. Teaching in excess of 900 undergraduate students each year, she is passionate about the value that immersive mental health simulation can bring to student’s learning and clinical skills and the way that it can safely bring to life theoretical concepts related to mental healthcare. Karen-Ann currently supervises a number of honours, masters and PhD students and is part of numerous research projects, involving visualisation and simulation, mental illness, suicide prevention and the inclusion of people with lived experience of mental illness into the teaching and learning space. See Educator Profile