DSN AGM & conference 2017
- by Louise Freeman
- •
- 02 Dec, 2017
- •
DSN held our 2017 Annual General Meeting and conference at the London Canal Museum today.
Click here
to see event details.
A successful year of DSN's activities was reviewed, followed by the election of DSN's officers and committee.
Elected for 2017-18 :
- Co-chair: Dr Louise Freeman and Dr Angelika Luehrs
- Vice chair: Dr Malcolm Kinnear
- Treasurer: Dr Wendy Reid
- Secretaries - membership: Dr Susan Atcheson
- general: Dr Matthew Christie: - Committee: Dr Jacqueline Haworth, Dr Clive Morgan and Dr Mahomed Saleh
We then took part in a marketing workshop to redefine DSN's key messages.
The workshop was delivered by Andy Ditchburn of Perro. Andy went through his market, message, medium process to help us to identify DSN's core idea and values before finalising our key messages.
We came up with a long list of DSN's key values before weeding them out to the short list below.
- supportive
- inclusive
- unique
- informative
- respected
- confidential
- championing
- compassion
- independent
We then worked on DSN's core idea and key messages with Andy's expert help. Andy has provided a report on his full recommendations, attached here.
Great to meet DSN members today and we all enjoyed working on the organisation's presentation in a supportive and positive environment.
Dr Louise Freeman addresses barriers to access to work faced by medics with mental ill health needing reasonable adjustments.
Dr Louise Freeman is the co-chair of the Doctors' Support Network. Here, she talks about why prioritising your own health can feel difficult in times of crisis such as the coronavirus pandemic.
Dr Serena Haywood on talking about her experience of mental ill health: 'The fear and isolation ... led me to take the risky decision to start talking about my mental health as much as I could to as many people as would listen. I was advised not to but did it anyway. And my life changed from there.'
Psychologist Caroline Elton discusses the difficult issue of talking about our own mental ill health. 'I don’t want to collude with the fantasy that depression, or any other mental illness, only happens to other people. It has certainly happened to me. '
CLANGERS, keeping well for medics, specialist support and creativity were all on the programme at our recent conference in Bristol.
Dr Cathy Wield discusses how and when to talk about our recovery from mental ill health.
DSN co-chairs, Dr Louise Freeman and Dr Angelika Luehrs, discuss how and why we are talking about our own mental health as doctors, including an explanation of our AndMe anti stigma campaign with the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons' Mind Matters Initiative.
Dr Cathy Wield discusses how we often shy away from naming physician mental health by using the term 'physician health'.
BBC Radio Five Live discussion about Prof. Steve Robson's article recounting his experience of attempting suicide as a trainee doctor with comment from his colleague Dr Kate Tree and an interview with Dr Laura McGregor, consultant in emergency medicine
Clare Gerada: ' We can't keep photographing the problem (physician health) - we need to do something about it.'
