Article Text
Abstract
Objective To develop a more in-depth understanding of how doctors do and do not access mental healthcare from the perspectives of doctors themselves and people they have contact with through the process.
Design Qualitative methodology was used with semistructured interviews transcribed and analysed using Grounded Theory. Participants were 11 doctors with experience as patients of psychiatrists, four doctor and four non-doctor personal contacts (friends, family and colleagues) and eight treating psychiatrists.
Results Participants described experiencing unrealistic expectations and a harsh work environment with poor self care and denial and minimisation of signs of mental health difficulties. Doctor contacts described particular difficulty in responding effectively to doctor friends, family and colleagues in need of mental healthcare. In contrast, non-doctor personal contacts were more able to identify and speak about concerns but not necessarily to enable accessing adequate mental-health services.
Conclusions Three areas with potential to address in supporting doctors' accessing of appropriate healthcare have been identified: (1) processes to enable doctors to maintain high standards of functioning with less use of minimisation and denial; (2) improving the quality and effectiveness of informal doctor-to-doctor conversations about mental-health issues among themselves; (3) role of non-doctor support people in identifying doctors' mental-health needs and enabling their access to mental healthcare. Further research in all these areas has the potential to contribute to improving doctors' access to appropriate mental healthcare and may be of value for the general population.
- Child & adolescent psychiatry
- adult psychiatry
- physicians' health
- accessing healthcare
- impaired physician
- mental health
This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial License, which permits use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non commercial and is otherwise in compliance with the license. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/ and http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/legalcode.
Statistics from Altmetric.com
Supplementary materials
Supplementary Data bmjopen-2010-000017
Files in this Data Supplement:
Footnotes
To cite: Stanton J, Randal P. Doctors accessing mental-health services: an exploratory study. BMJ Open 2011;1:e000017. doi:10.1136/bmjopen-2010-000017
Funding The research was funded by the Oakley Research Foundation, an independent trust.
Competing interests None.
Ethics approval Ethics approval was granted by the Ministry of Health Ethics Committee (No AKY/04/12/344) and consent forms approved them were signed by all participants.
Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; externally peer reviewed.