Subscribe to The Podcast by KevinMD. Watch on YouTube. Catch up on old episodes!

Anesthesiologist and clinical mental health counselor Maire Daugharty discusses her article, “Why peer support can save lives in high-pressure medical careers.” Drawing from her personal experience of losing three colleagues to suicide and overdose, Maire makes a powerful case for peer support as a direct antidote to the isolation that plagues the medical profession. She explains how the culture of medicine, with its relentless pursuit of perfection, leaves physicians vulnerable to despair when they inevitably face human fallibility. The conversation explores how structured peer support creates a space for authentic connection, validating shared struggles and mitigating the self-recrimination that can follow adverse outcomes. Maire also clarifies that while peer support is a lifeline, it is also a crucial tool for identifying colleagues who need deeper professional help, and for normalizing that next step. Her core message is an urgent call for medical environments to integrate protected peer support programs as an essential, proactive strategy to save lives.

Careers by KevinMD is your gateway to health care success. We connect you with real-time, exclusive resources like job boards, news updates, and salary insights, all tailored for health care professionals. With expertise in uniting top talent and leading employers across the nation’s largest health care hiring network, we’re your partner in shaping health care’s future. Fulfill your health care journey at KevinMD.com/careers.

VISIT SPONSOR → https://kevinmd.com/careers

Discovering disability insurance? Pattern understands your concerns. Over 20,000 doctors trust us for straightforward, affordable coverage. We handle everything from quotes to paperwork. Say goodbye to insurance stress – visit Pattern today at KevinMD.com/pattern.

VISIT SPONSOR → https://kevinmd.com/pattern

SUBSCRIBE TO THE PODCAST → https://www.kevinmd.com/podcast

RECOMMENDED BY KEVINMD → https://www.kevinmd.com/recommended

Transcript

Kevin Pho: Hi, and welcome to the show. Subscribe at KevinMD.com/podcast. Today we welcome back Maire Daugharty. She’s an anesthesiologist and clinical mental health counselor. Today’s KevinMD article is “Why peer support can save lives in high-pressure medical careers.” Maire, welcome back to the show.

Maire Daugharty: Thank you.

Kevin Pho: All right. Tell us what your latest KevinMD article is about.

Maire Daugharty: Yeah, so actually this article started out with my thinking around the differences between coaching, peer support, and psychotherapy. I really wanted to delineate those a little bit more concretely, and it ultimately ended up being an article about peer support and why peer support is so very important.

I read an article recently written about the idea of needing connection in the medical profession, particularly for physicians, but it talked about providing retreats as opposed to providing a connection that fits into your workday. It didn’t really talk about why peer support is so important in the context of the responsibility that we uphold on a daily basis, whether we’re consciously or unconsciously aware of it, and what happens when we get into trouble with patient care—and the possibility of that, which is what we take on in this profession.

What I landed on was that coaching is really effective for developing leadership skills, for exploring career change, and for developing some skills around professional relationships. It is also really important that people who offer coaching recognize when somebody is not appropriate for coaching but might need some other modality. Similarly, one of the really important things that peer support can provide, besides the connection with someone who has struggled with some of the similar experiences, is recognizing when somebody needs more professional, more dedicated, more specific assistance navigating a particular problem. So that’s what I ended up landing on in terms of this particular article, and then going back and thinking about some of my experiences with some of my peers who probably would have benefited from some of those offerings.

Kevin Pho: I was reading your article, and one thing that made me think was those physician lounges that we used to have. I’ve been practicing for 23 years, and I remember when I first started, we still had those physician lounges where doctors would just talk socially among one another. And like you said, it was within the course of their workday; it wasn’t like a special session. But now physicians are so siloed, and you have so many different specialties, we rarely see each other in a social setting where potentially we could have that opportunity to commiserate.

Maire Daugharty: Yeah, I 100 percent agree, and in fact, I’ll share an experience. We worked in a small community hospital for a very, very long time, and basically what happened was that hospital closed down and we moved to a new facility. One of the things that I noticed almost right off the bat, and that we talk about in our physician circles at work, is that we used to have a lounge that was warm, friendly, and open. Physicians from all specialties—hospitalists, neurologists, surgeons, anesthesiologists—would come together during periods throughout the day and have a chance to sit down, relax, and talk about, “What did we think about this patient? What did we think about the plan associated with this?”

We don’t really have that anymore. We do have a physician lounge, but it’s separated from the hospital and it’s kind of cold. It’s just not a warm, inviting place. The seating is not arranged to invite conversation the way that it used to be. I think of this as a really sad change in association with opening up a brand new hospital that doesn’t recognize the importance of having places where we can come together and talk about and share stories, including stories that are sometimes a little bit difficult.

Kevin Pho: In your article, you shared a tragic story about some of your colleagues that really highlights the isolation that we clinicians often face in medicine.

Maire Daugharty: Yeah. Yes. When my family and I originally decided to move to Colorado, I thought the best way to do that would be to do locums work and get to know the local anesthesia community. It was an amazing experience. It also was really challenging for some of the reasons that I delineated in my article. I got to know some people really, really well, and unfortunately, two of whom succumbed to completed suicide. That really rocked my world because both of those were really unexpected. The third person who died in my cohort struggled with drug addiction, and we were pretty unaware of it until all of a sudden it was reported that he died and the circumstances under which he died.

I really started to think at the time about what happens to people who come to work on a daily basis, who get along really well, who put on a really good professional face, and yet clearly have significant things going on in their lives that lead to an end result such as this. So that was kind of the start of my journey in terms of thinking around segueing back into mental health, which was something that I have been interested in for a lifetime.

One thing I recognized was that we do live in silos. There are so many things that we truly have in common. I say that from the perspective of a physician who’s worked in multiple environments, of a physician to whom people come looking for help, and from listening to physicians talk in my practice. I talk to a lot of physicians about issues that we really all face together. Wouldn’t it be helpful if we all knew that we shared some of these things in common? And so that’s what really got me rolling in that direction.

Kevin Pho: I can only imagine that if there was an opportunity for peer support, as you mentioned earlier, sometimes one can recognize symptoms that may necessitate further help. And also, it sounds like it would be a safe space that allows clinicians to share some of those stories and some of those vulnerabilities that they otherwise may not have the opportunity to do.

Maire Daugharty: Yeah, right, because we’re also always thinking about the litigious nature of American medicine. Is it safe to share? Under what circumstances is it safe to share? People who are engaged in lawsuits are advised not to talk about the case, and so our hands are really tied in those circumstances. It’s really important to think about some kind of environment where we can come together and say, “Yeah, I pulled out an amp of what I thought was Zofran, an anti-nausea medication, and it turns out it was an amp of highly concentrated epinephrine.” Now, in my tactile work, since I’m pulling amps out of a drawer all day long, I sensed that something was wrong and I looked, but boy, that was a really close call. That was pretty terrifying, the idea of delivering a milligram of epinephrine rather than four milligrams of Zofran.

There are multiple points in our workday where that can happen, and sometimes it does. And so if physicians are aware that they’re not alone in those occurrences and those possibilities, they can process through, accept, and walk into work with a very realistic idea of what it is that we’re taking on in our day-to-day work life. Then they don’t have to do all of the things that we do to defend against that reality, some of which are really unhealthy.

Kevin Pho: So what’s the answer? Especially as we become more siloed, what are some of the things that you suggest?

Maire Daugharty: I presented a talk on physician wellbeing last year, and one of the questions was, “What is the answer?” I said, “Unfortunately, the answer is not simple and straightforward.” We recognize what the problems are. They’ve been studied extensively. In fact, in a recent meeting with a group geared towards wellbeing in the American Society of Anesthesiology, they talked about further studies delineating the problem of completed suicide among anesthesiologists. My thinking was, we’ve identified that problem. We know that it’s a problem, and we know that it’s a big problem. What we really need to focus on is what we do about this problem.

When we look at the issues that consistently come up, either in physician conversations or in studies dedicated to identifying problems, it’s the electronic health record. It’s prior authorizations with the insurance industry. It is the increasingly shrinking time that we are given to spend with patients, which really takes away the piece of medicine that drives us, right? The connection piece, the empathy piece, the “I’m taking care of people” piece, the understanding piece. So those are things that fundamentally need to be addressed and are not addressed with the occasional retreat that really doesn’t solve the problem.

In my thinking, in some type of peer support environment, we have an opportunity to come together as physicians and start to share our experiences and start to think, “What can we do about this?” If we work in a silo, we have no opportunity to come together, identify the problem, and present some potential solutions. So that’s the first thing. So peer support in the sense of taking care of each other in our more difficult moments, but also a venue in which we can come together and say, “This is really a problem. What are some potential solutions for this?” It is really kind of tackling the silo problem.

Kevin Pho: And if a hospital administrator is listening to you now, how can they bring clinicians together to offer that peer support? Periodic meetings or what? What would that look like on a practical basis?

Maire Daugharty: So practically speaking, it’s really challenging because you’re asking physicians to devote every single minute of their day to patient care and then often go home and do the cleanup work. Make sure I checked all the labs, make sure I got all my notes done. So how do you introduce a potentially regularly scheduled meeting for those purposes in the context of that working environment? To administrators, my plea would be to come up with solutions that are reasonable for the physician workday, and maybe that means tackling some of the realities of the physician workday.

Kevin Pho: So tell me a success story. You’ve talked with and spoken at multiple medical institutions. What would be an example of a positive direction when it comes to improving clinician peer support? What’s a story or an example that you could share with us?

Maire Daugharty: Yeah. I would say at this point, it is really about increasing awareness. For example, when I presented on physician wellbeing, the reason that talk came together was multifactorial, but one of the reasons was they had a couple of clinicians who were really clearly in trouble and they really wanted to make a substantial difference. I think increasing awareness that we have a problem, these are the problems, and these are the variables associated with the problem that we need to change is really the first step. And then being able to, with that knowledge, say, “OK, what can we do about this, practically speaking?”

Kevin Pho: One of the things that I found helpful would be something like Facebook. I know that there are a lot of closed, physician-only groups on Facebook that offer that virtual physician’s lounge that we used to have. So what are your experiences with those groups?

Maire Daugharty: Yeah, so I belong to a handful of physician groups. Some are more geared towards, “I’m having personal problems. What does the group think might be helpful?” Some are more geared towards practicalities like, “I’m looking for a nanny. Where’s the best place to go on vacation?” Some are geared towards, “These are medical problems that I have questions about. Can we talk about this?” All of them have their pros. All of them have things to offer.

I think the biggest thing that all of them offer is the reality that we are not alone in trying to tackle this problem. We are not alone in feeling these feelings. We are not alone in trying to figure out, “How do I navigate family, relationships, and work as a physician that is so time-consuming and so emotion-consuming?” And for that reason, I think some of those Facebook groups are really, really helpful. It is the first time some people experience, “Oh, I’m not the only one who struggles with this.”

Kevin Pho: It’s really that isolation component, right? And having that safe space where you can realize that people are going through the same issues that you yourself as a physician are going through.

Maire Daugharty: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely.

Kevin Pho: We’re talking to Maire Daugharty, anesthesiologist and clinical mental health counselor. Today’s KevinMD article is “Why peer support can save lives in high-pressure medical careers.” Maire, let’s end with some take-home messages that you want to leave with the KevinMD audience.

Maire Daugharty: Yeah. I would say in particular with respect to the conversation that we’re having today, my take-home message would be: please don’t wait until it’s a crisis before reaching out for help.

Kevin Pho: Maire, thank you so much for sharing your perspective and insight. Thanks for coming back on the show.

Maire Daugharty: Thank you.