In 2019, Lorraine Sharp began noticing that something was off. She dreaded going to work in the morning. She continually felt she wasn’t doing enough for her patients. For nearly a decade, she’d worked part time in a group practice in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario; while the team set-up meant she had administrative support, she was solely responsible for her roster of 800 patients. She also worked on call at the regional hospital. If she ever considered taking a break to go on vacation, she imagined the paperwork and backlog of appointments piling up in her absence. “It was this constant feeling that if I didn’t work at maximum capacity, there wasn’t a buffer in the system,” she says. “There wasn’t anyone stepping in when I was away. So I took probably a little too much ownership of the patients.” Family doctors feel the burden of being solely responsible for their patients’ health care, says Sharp, even when it extends beyond their capacity or training. Living in a smaller city meant she often had trouble finding specialists to refer her patients to.
Over time, Sharp experienced anxiety, depression, and, eventually, hypomania. But the symptoms all seemed to her, at first, like isolated incidents. “I didn’t notice that what I was experiencing for a number of years was burnout,” she says. She left her practice in the spring of 2022.
