Doctors’ Health South Australia Program Evaluation

Doctors’ Health South Australia Program Evaluation Summary Report

Ensuring doctors are healthy is critical for maximising the quality and efficiency of healthcare provided to the community. Yet, doctors experience comparable, if not worse, health than the general population despite their strong health knowledge.

This arises from various barriers doctors experience when accessing healthcare, including:

• Having limited or no rapport with a general practitioner
• Being able to self-treat
• Having a high threshold of when to seek healthcare support
• Limited time to seek healthcare
• Concern regarding the confidentiality of medical services
• Practitioners having limited understanding of mandatory reporting requirements
• Professional stigma against illness
• Cultural expectations of self-sacrifice within medicine
• The fears regarding impacts of seeking help on professional registration

To address these barriers, doctors’ health services have been established both internationally and in Australia. However, there are limited published data evaluating the impacts of these services.

Doctors’ Health South Australia (DHSA) offers a unique model that provides a comprehensive suite of services to support doctors’ engagement with the healthcare sector. This evaluation was commissioned by DHSA to examine the DHSA program’s impact on the wellbeing of South Australian (and, to a lesser extent, Northern Territory) doctors and medical students.

You can read the summary report here.