What Is Peer Support?

Peer support encourages an authentic human connection with another person who shares similar life experiences – in this case, the unique stressors and challenges faced by physicians. Physician peers offer non-judgmental listening and non-clinical support with life, work and other issues. We aim to facilitate these confidential, non-clinical, empathetic conversations between colleagues, where physicians feel safe to share issues they are experiencing with someone trained to listen.

Objectives

The purposes of this initiative are:

1. To facilitate responsive and proactive formal peer support opportunities for physicians needing emotional support for work or life-related stressors.
2. To train and support physician peer supporters to offer non-clinical emotional support to physician colleagues in formal peer support settings.
3. To provide opportunities for participating local organizations (Divisions, MSAs, Sections, etc.) to share knowledge and collaborate as they develop and build their own local peer support programs.
4. To actively pursue alignment and coordination between different peer support programs provincially.

Confidentiality

Confidentiality is essential to effective peer support interactions, and peer supporters sign confidentiality agreements as part of their commitment. However, these conversations may be legally discoverable, so peer supporters do not take written notes during interactions. If any notes are taken, they must be shredded or destroyed afterward. Rather than focusing on specific details of a situation, peer supporters emphasize the emotional impact and coping strategies.

In rare circumstances, confidentiality must be broken—such as when a physician is at risk of harming themselves or others, or when a peer supporter has a direct reason to believe someone is engaging in unsafe behavior. These exceptions align with the same confidentiality limits that apply in a physician’s clinical practice.

When Might Someone Benefit From Peer Support?

Peer support might be helpful for physicians who experience work or life stressors and require emotional, non-judgmental support. Examples of these scenarios might be:

• Adverse clinical event (including but not limited to an adverse patient outcome).
• Patient or college complaint.
• Interpersonal/relational conflict with a patient or colleague.
• Acute life stressor which impacts career (e.g. birth of a new child or bereavement).
• Struggles with burnout/moral injury.
• A change that has happened at work that impacts you emotionally.
• Experience of discrimination or alienation/othering at work (e.g. related to race, gender identity, sexual orientation, physical ability or other) from patients, colleagues or staff.

Click here for the self referral intake form
Click here to refer a colleague

Click here to fill out the post-satisfaction survey (Your feedback is important to us! Please fill this survey out after your support session with a peer supporter, thank you).