Abstract
BackgroundNutrition is often a casualty of the busy work day for physicians. We aimed to explore physicians' views of their nutrition in the workplace including their perceptions of the impact of inadequate nutrition upon their personal wellness and their professional performance.MethodsThis is a qualitative study of a sample of 20 physicians practicing in a large urban teaching hospital. Semi-structured open ended interviews were conducted to explore physicians' views of workplace nutrition. The same physicians had agreed to participate in a related nutrition based wellness intervention study that compared nutritional intake and cognitive function during a day of usual nutrition patterns against another day with scheduled nutrition breaks. A second set of interviews was conducted after the intervention study to explore how participation in the intervention impacted these views. Detailed interview content notes were transcribed and analyzed independently with differences reconciled by discussion.ResultsAt initial interview, participants reported difficulty accessing adequate nutrition at work, linking this deficit with emotional (irritable and frustrated), physical (tired and hungry), and cognitive (difficulty concentrating and poor decision making) symptoms. In addition to identifying practical barriers such as lack of time to stop and eat, inconvenient access to food and poor food choices, the physicians described how their sense of professionalism and work ethic also hinder their work nutrition practices. After participating in the intervention, most physicians reported heightened awareness of their nutrition patterns and intentions to improve their workplace nutrition.ConclusionsPhysicians report that inadequate workplace nutrition has a significant negative impact on their personal wellness and professional performance. Given this threat to health care delivery, health care organizations and the medical profession need to address both the practical and professional barriers identified.
Highlights
Nutrition is often a casualty of the busy work day for physicians
We inquired as to how they experience inadequate nutrition in the workplace in terms of their personal wellness and professional performance, and whether or not they perceived a link between their nutrition and cognitive performance
We asked “Think back to a busy work day where you maybe did not have time to eat and drink properly. Do you think it had an impact on you? In what way? How did you feel physically, psychologically, cognitively? Do you think it had an impact on your work? In what way? Do you think it had an impact on how you treated your colleagues, other health care professionals? Did it impact your ability to complete your work?” All of the participants reported that they thought that inadequate nutrition had some impact on them and almost all reported experiencing emotional symptoms including irritability, frustration, decreased patience and feeling emotionally drained
Summary
Nutrition is often a casualty of the busy work day for physicians. We aimed to explore physicians’ views of their nutrition in the workplace including their perceptions of the impact of inadequate nutrition upon their personal wellness and their professional performance. There is growing empirical evidence of an association between physicians’ wellness and their ability to deliver quality health care [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9] and yet physicians are often unable to tend to their wellness [10]. Physicians report that they frequently cannot eat and drink properly or at all during work hours [11,12,13,14]. We asked about whether or not they have difficulty meeting their nutritional needs at work, their
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