Teaching on the run tips 13: being a good supervisor — preventing problems

Lake, Fiona R; Ryan, Gerard

doi:10.5694/j.1326-5377.2006.tb00294.x

Topics

Work in medicine has many stressors.1,2 Failing to cope well with these stressors can lead to emotional exhaustion and burnout.1,2 Junior medical officers (JMOs) who can’t cope with stress make significantly more errors.3 This leads to increased costs as a result of JMO absenteeism and litigation by patients against hospitals because of suboptimal care.4,5 As outlined in “Tips 11”, the causes of poor performance may lie with the person, the system, or the supervisor.6 Supervision is often perceived to be inadequate by JMOs and lack of supervisors one of their greatest stressors.7

1 Education Centre, Faculty of Medicine and Dentistry, University of Western Australia, Perth, WA.
2 Department of Respiratory Medicine, Sir Charles Gairdner Hospital, Perth, WA.

Correspondence: Fiona.Lake@uwa.edu.au

Acknowledgements:

We would like to thank the teachers and participants in Teaching on the Run courses for their input, and the Medical Training Review Panel, Australian Department of Health and Ageing, for funding support.

Competing interests:

None identified.

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