Healthcare workers can we make hope contagious

February 26, 2025 Published by Sharee Johnson

Hope is my core value and has been my whole professional life. Hope signals optimism, a forward stance, attitude and empowerment. At least for me, hope is not wishful thinking, it’s a conscious choice to focus on what might be possible.

Hope can infuse a strategy with energy and momentum, but hope is not a strategy on its own. To really drive change, we can build on hope, we can hold hope at the centre of our decisions, and we can feel it in our bodies. 

Hope can generate activity, creativity and a certain kind of focus. It cannot create miracles. At least not all by itself. 

To really activate the possibilities hope represents, we need knowledge, resources and probably each other. Hopefulness, like many other attitudes can be contagious, helping many boats rise.

For example, doctors, nurses and pretty much everyone working in healthcare, hopes the healthcare system will change. Patients do too. 

The current way we run healthcare creates more stress than healing, for too many people, we wish it were different. We lament the damage it does to patients through medical error and misadventure, through long wait times and inequitable access. We rage against the burnout and moral injury it is causing healthcare workers year on year. 

The numbers stay the same or get worse, even though we seem to all agree… the healthcare system needs to change. COVID gave us all an opportunity to notice lots of things, one of the things that is now taken much more seriously is doctor wellbeing. That idea was pretty much ignored until 2020, including by doctors themselves. 

Doctor wellbeing was denigrated to the bottom of a tick box list of things to consider when wondering about how to improve the healthcare system. Hoping a psychologist or psychiatrist or perhaps a few GPs would pick up the fallen along the way. 

That is how we have managed to keep going, with hope. 

Sadly, I have spoken to lots of doctors who have ‘lost’ hope. Work is a grind, a trap, a means to an end financially, a disappointment after all these years of hope! This is much more than sad. This mental state of hopelessness increases risk and hazards for patients and their doctors, in the short and long term.  

A doctor in this survival mode is unable to generate or create new ideas or to truly connect with others around them. They are using all of their resources to stay alive. Finding something to be hopeful about can be the thread to a healthier, happier life and better medical practice. 

Begin with anything you can feel hopeful about, a good night’s sleep, a compassionate ear from a friend or a counsellor, some sun on your face, a full body welcome home from your dog, a walk with someone you care about. 

Hope can be found in connection with others and in nature, in any moment. 

Be curious about where you can find hope in your life.  Remember that you can choose where your attention goes, maybe you can even hope to establish a new habit that creates hope. Talk with someone you trust about hope, ask them what they feel hopeful about. 

If you are talking with a healthcare worker who feels hopeless about their work, the system or the future, share something you feel hopeful about with them.  Life includes challenge, struggle and lemons. Right now, there are many wicked challenges in health in so many countries.  As Martin Luther King, Jnr said 

“We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope”.  

Please join me in noticing the glimmers of hope and tell people about them. Healthcare workers can use a little bit of encouragement right now. 

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Sharee Johnson is the Founder, Managing Director, Principal Coach at Coaching for Doctors. She is the bestselling author of The Thriving Doctor: How to be more balanced and fulfilled, working in medicine and a Registered Psychologist. She has written extensively about doctor wellbeing, performance and coaching, delivers workshops to doctors and speaks at medical conferences. You can connect with her on Linkedin and Instagram. The best way is to subscribe to the Coaching for Doctors monthly newsletter

The Thriving Doctor

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Sharee Johnson’s book The Thriving Doctor is available in all good bookstores or online.

Sharee has been coaching doctors since 2014, find out more about her work