Connect with colleagues and reignite your passion for family medicine! Join our small group learning sessions to celebrate your wins, explore common challenges and discover new strategies for success. Register by March 12, 2025.
Our small group learning sessions offer a unique opportunity to learn from your peers and enhance your practice. These closed groups of up to twelve participants provide a safe space to openly discuss the challenges and successes of your practice, particularly in areas related to mental health, substance use disorders and chronic pain. Each session is co-facilitated by two Peer Guides who will help guide the discussion. Groups meet virtually every four to six weeks for 1.5 hours over the course of a year.
Program Benefits
Explore approaches that relate to the issues you experience when caring for people with mental health, substance use disorders and/or chronic pain.
Gain strategies to find joy in your work amidst the challenges you face in the healthcare system.
Consider ways to bring ease to supporting patients in the areas where you face difficulties.
Join a Small Group
The following seven groups are being offered. Please only sign up for one group based on your schedule and interests.
By registering for one of the groups below, you commit to attending and participating in group discussions.
These groups are open to family physicians in Ontario (practicing, on leave, retirement, etc.) and family medicine residents.
Sign up by Wednesday, March 12 to secure your spot.
This group offers family physicians a safe and supportive space to discuss the unique issues and stresses that arise as they close their practices and prepare for retirement or as they begin their retirement.
Examples of themes that may arise:
How to say goodbye to patients knowing they may not find another physician easily.
Technical issues involved in closing a practice.
Maintaining mental and physical health/self care as we age without feeling guilty
What to do with the sudden free time and how to create a guilt free bucket list.
Relating to family and friends’ post-retirement. What changes?
Ontario family physicians from all stages and practice models interested in having a supportive space to connect are welcome to join this small group.
Judy and Chase, the co-facilitators, hope to provide a place to speak about what’s good and what’s challenging in our professional practices in a confidential, respectful way.
This group is open to all family physicians who struggle to set appropriate boundaries for a work-life balance. Each session is designed to help physicians learn various approaches to optimizing emotional resilience and will include mindfulness practices, managing difficult emotions, and building resilience.
Learning objectives:
Become more aware of the significance of the relationship between the health professional and the patient.
To increase their understanding of psychotherapist – patient communications.
Be able to recognize the feelings that are evoked by the interaction with the patient and be able to use these for the benefit of the patient and be able to use the group to express and process anxieties and frustrations about their work
To provide Physicians with an opportunity to explore the emotional aspects of their work in a safe collegial environment.
To provide support and to encourage health professionals to reflect more deeply on their work.
This group is for family physicians who are either transitioning to or currently practicing psychotherapy.
By the end of this year-long group, you will:
Engage in meaningful and safe discussions around incorporating psychotherapy in your practice, and/or transitioning your practice to psychotherapy.
Give and receive support to and from your fellow group members, share resources that you have found helpful in your personal and professional lives in working with patients who struggle with mental health, substance use disorders and chronic pain concerns.
Gain empowerment and confidence as you continue along your exciting and unique journey as a family physician practicing psychotherapy, recognizing, validating, and navigating the unique physician-patient experiences we all face.
This group is open to primary care physicians at any stage of their career who are looking for an opportunity to ask questions about diagnostic and treatment issues in psychiatry in general terms vs. consultations on specific patient care issues.
By the end of this year-long group, participants will:
Have an opportunity to engage in dialogue with psychiatrists and other family doctors.
Clarify one’s diagnostic and treatment skills in the psychiatric areas of primary care.
Gain confidence in dealing with psychiatric issues in primary care.
This group is for any physician experiencing chronic illness and/or disability including those currently working in or on leave from clinical roles those, and those in nonclinical roles.
