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Physician leadership
Coaching

Physician leadership
Coaching

Amanda

Amanda (Mandy) Brisebois

MSc, MD, FRCPC, FACP, AoADI, CEC, PCC (ICF), CHE, CCPE, Med., MMgmt (IMHL)

Geographic Location: Location not significant factor for conflict coaching. However, I am in Edmonton, AB and have also practiced in Calgary, AB, and Victoria, BC.

Certification/Years as a coach: Coaching since 2012 with certification from Mayo Clinic – Certified Wellness Coach, Center for Executive Coaching Executive and Healthcare Leadership. Certified through Justice Institute of British Columbia for Mediation and trained in negotiation and conflict coaching.

I am a passionate physician who has worked tirelessly on the front lines caring for patients since 2000. Throughout my career, I have seen changes that have degraded physician autonomy and have negatively impacted our outlook. Health system culture changes and operational pressures have forced physicians to alter how they are practicing medicine, ultimately impacting our ability to focus on patient care. I have concerns regarding the sustainability of the profession and want to help.

Having been through conflict myself in my medical career, I have experienced too many situations in which little attention was paid to consistency and process. A lack of process and transparency can lead to the perception of unsatisfactory outcomes for many practitioners when facing conflict.  Seeing this lack of process firsthand drove me into leadership, hoping to impact change and to support physicians facing issues in their practices.

The formal leadership journey that I embarked upon started in 2014 and ended up in my leading a team of 350 physicians through Covid pandemic. During the Covid pandemic, it became apparent that conflict for practitioners and their teams was at an all-time high, and little resource was available to support these physicians. Physicians were losing sleep, sacrificing personal relationships, and removing themselves from their workplaces due to a lack of capacity to achieve satisfactory resolution to conflict. I spent 100s of hours coaching colleagues and teams during this time, but still saw a lack of process in the system to deal with physicians’ issues.

It was clear to me in my coaching that physicians are not trained to handle conflict, leadership, or equity and inclusion. I undertook over 2 years of intense education in these areas to become a respected advocate and teacher in these areas. As society entered summer 2022, and the new generation of the pandemic met us, I made a goal to ensure that practitioners have the skills to create professional success out of conflict. These skills can support practitioners to love their careers once again by freeing time to focus on the field of medicine that they strove so hard to enter. This is my calling, and I want to share the skills and process that can also lead you to productive conflict in your life.