What can sport teach medicine?
Sunday, October 25, 2015
Anaesthetists work under mental stress on a par with that of highly-trained soldiers and elite athletes and should be
given the same training to meet those extreme demands, a meeting of anaesthetists heard this weekend.
Dr Geoff Healy, an anaesthetist from NSW and Dr Mark Stacey, an anaesthetist from Cardiff in the UK, said mental
training to deal with highly stressful environments was useful both in elite sports training and military training and
was the type of training specialist medical professionals benefit from.
Dr Healy said at his Rescue Helicopter Service and hospital in Sydney he had begun heart rate monitoring of anaesthetic
registrars, consultants and of paramedics, deliberately putting them in “high cognitive load” simulations and measuring
their responses before and after they had undergone training to deal with extreme mental stress.
“We have been seeing a definite trend towards improved performance and higher subjective performance ratings with the
skills we have been teaching,” Dr Healy said.
“The way we think has a massive influence on our outcomes of task performance, diagnosis, motor skills and interaction
with other human beings.”
Dr Stacey said the body’s stress response was the same whether you were an Olympic athlete or an army soldier – or a
doctor.
“We, as experienced, highly trained clinicians, dealing with life or death circumstances every day, are essentially like
the elite athletes,” Dr Stacey said.
“We can improve our performances, and improve how we cope with these stressful, high cognitive load situations, through
what has been learnt in the elite sports arena, and through the military training preparing elite soldiers for battle.”
Performance under stress has been investigated, reviewed and refined in sports and the military for over three decades,
Dr Healy said.
“By understanding how our bodies deal with and are affected by stress, we can learn some strategies to control it, and
sometimes harness it to our advantage, to improve our performance.”
ENDS