Healthy boundaries are important to have in place in many areas of our lives. Working in healthcare requires us to manage a number of boundaries which serve to: maintain a level of professionalism, ensure we are effective within our role, and protect both practitioner and patient.
Boundaries help us to define and communicate the parameters of our role, setting clear lines as to what is (and just as importantly, what is not) within our scope of practice. This can mean the difference between stepping outside our area of expertise and knowing when to refer on or discharge.
With this in mind, boundaries can be really helpful in setting expectations of the people we work with, whether this be patients or our fellow colleagues. This can be especially important when adopting a health coaching approach as it ensures patients both understand and feel empowered to step into a more active role in conversations around their health and care.
Boundaries are also essential for supporting our own health and wellbeing at work. This might mean looking at the physical boundaries we set around time, caseload or diary management. But it’s also important to have good psychological boundaries in place to help us navigate the lines that exist between empathy and taking things on as our own, or between wanting to help and carrying the responsibility for a patient’s outcome.
Like most people who enter into healthcare, we want to help, but if we are not careful we can feel drawn into taking on too much or feeling unable to say no. We can start to see it as our role to support people even when that support goes beyond the limitations of our role or service. There is no doubt it can be challenging to step back from the call to help when we see people in need. However, when we allow this ‘call to help’ to compromise important boundaries, we run a very real risk of fostering dependency and consequently burning ourselves out. This ultimately leads to the delivery of poorer quality care as well as having negative consequences on our own health, wellbeing and happiness.
Healthy boundary setting can help us to work more efficiently and effectively, and because this in turn supports us to bring the best of ourselves to work, our interactions with people become that bit more impactful. This not only supports better outcomes but it feels good for both us and our patients.
Have a think about some of the boundaries you have in your life – where do you notice you are good at setting clear boundaries that you don’t compromise on? How does this support you?
Now think about some areas where you don’t have clear boundaries, or where you find yourself often compromising on your boundaries – what impact is this having? What would you like to change about this? What would setting a boundary around this look like to you?