Daniel Gearon: Providing wellbeing support for doctors

Hi, my name’s Daniel Gearon. I’m a surgical trainee at Royal Papworth Hospital and I’m currently enrolled on the Master’s in entrepreneurship at Cambridge Judge Business School. My venture is called You OK doc? It’s a mental health and well-being charity for doctors. Like I said it was founded in October 2018. So as the founder and as a doctor at the time, I’ve been a doctor about three years. I realised the stresses and strains that doctors go through.

There are some pretty alarming statistics regarding doctors mental health, particularly with burnout. About 80% of doctors reported burnout in a British Medical Association study of about 6,000 participants. And then 55% of those went on to seek psychological help. And then also the amounts of doctors taking their lives was estimated to be about to four times more than the national average when compared to a general population.

And I think obviously the very nature of being a doctor, you will be witnessing traumatic events. My cousin was a consultant down in London on a labour-intensive care unit. And in December 2016, she took her own life rather unexpectedly. We created a service called The Huddle. In essence, it was a 25 person group therapy held online every Thursday for doctors. That was our first real service and that was a success.

So we started the webinar series and the idea, again, for some of the speakers in the webinar series stemmed from my background. I used to play tennis in America, I was a college tennis player and before that, I was at Tennis Academy. And when I was at Tennis Academy at 16, I had access to a sports psychologist. And we all had access to sports psychologists. It was the same sports psychologist for about hundreds of us. I mean, it was a drop-in clinic that we could go and see him and talk about the latest matches, et cetera. When COVID-19 happened, and when the thought of the webinar happened and the thought of athletes and then kind of Zoom came into its own being and me, I’m not a very tech-savvy person.

But something actually once one service probably could be delivered through online services. It’s now our vision that we do replicate that every doctor has access to a name psychotherapist. And what this platform will be able to do is to be implemented across hospitals say, hopefully, Papworth and Adam Brooks first. As I mentioned, I’m part of Cambridge Judge Business School and the Masters in Entrepreneurship.

And I think one of the really important things that being part of that cohort of people that starts in 2019 is that when I first arrived during the residential week, I realised that actually, I’m not alone like we’re all starting our own ventures. And when you start a venture it can be a quite isolating place. There are not many other people that are doing what you’re doing. And having that group of people to rely on or sorry, not necessarily rely on but to communicate with and knowing that they’re there going through the same process that you are. It’s extremely comforting and also academically, it’s extremely enriching.