Turning Wounds into Wisdom (TSDFT30165)

Veronica Conboy is a trained coach, facilitator and storyteller. She is a retired orthopaedic surgeon and ex-Associate Medical Director of TSD.

Previous feedback for this workshop: “quite honestly one of the best sessions I have been to as a doctor”.

Recommended to all

Work is hard, training is hard.

Continually stretching for new knowledge is hard.

At some point during your clinical practice something bad will happen. That, too, is hard.

These challenges are all completely normal in early postgraduate training.

So how do we deal with these episodes? What do they mean for our practice as doctors? How do we keep the learning and minimise the damage?

This workshop uses traditional storytelling, simple exercises and discussion to explore these themes.

Stories have been used by humankind to transfer wisdom since Homo Sapiens evolved. Many traditional stories carry motifs that are thousands of years old. Their very survival as stories that are told and retold suggests that they may carry some messages that chime with their listeners; that embed and stick.

Using traditional stories as workshop material has a strength that comes from the use of metaphor, which allows participants to identify “in parallel” with their concerns rather than on a purely personal level.