Exploring How Wellbeing Is Lived In Canadian Pathology
A Structural Existential Analysis
With the support of the Canadian Association of Pathologists, I am conducting an in-depth qualitative study exploring how Canadian pathologists experience wellbeing within the conditions of their professional world. This study attends to workload, meaning, identity, relationships, leadership, patient connection, and the tensions that shape what it is like to live and work within pathology.
connection & fulfillment
wellbeing
burnout
Unpicking Negative Culture In Canadian Pathology
Uncivil Behaviour in Context
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Unpicking what constitutes “bad behaviour,” from incivility to outright harassment.
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Examining if harmful contexts narrow behavioural repertoires and increase guardedness.
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Identifying where harmful behaviours are most present: peers, leadership, or others.
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Exploring whether workplace harm shapes silence, withdrawal, and willingness to enage.
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Exploring relationships between negative behaviours and what makes speaking up unsafe.
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Exploring whether negative workplace culture obstructs values-led professional action.
Background
Pathologists are at a 2.44-fold risk for low psychological wellbeing compared to any other specialty in Canadian medicine
Quotes from the pathology community
Learn more about our studies
We are conducting research projects on Canadian pathologist wellbeing, including professional culture, incivility, bullying, and the conditions that support or erode wellbeing in pathology. By sharing lived experience, pathologists can help ensure that future research, recommendations, and conversations about change are grounded in the realities of the profession.
Publications & Conferences
Closing Plenary Presentation at CAP-ACP's AGM 2025 & the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons Roundtable 2025
The COVID-19 pandemic overwhelmed pathology services, halting routine case reviews and disrupting resident training. In response, the Canadian Association of Pathologists launched virtual one-hour webinars, allowing pathologists to learn while working and ensuring residents remained exposed to essential cases. Using a convergent mixed-methods design, data from 115 post-session evaluation surveys were analysed. While 80% of participants felt the webinars enhanced their competence, only 66% believed this would impact patient outcomes — revealing a disconnect between pathologists' work and its perceived clinical significance. It took a webinar to remind them of the clinical impact they carry.
Beyond skill-building, participants expressed a meaningful desire to reconnect with colleagues through multidisciplinary collaboration, and there was a strong call to engage leadership in addressing burnout as a shared responsibility. These findings highlight the multifaceted value of virtual continuing medical education: not only enhancing diagnostic and teaching skills, but helping pathologists reconnect with meaning and purpose in their work.
Canadian pathologists lack workload protection, resulting in excessive unpaid overtime that contributes to medical errors, rising medicolegal risk, and mental health deterioration — a crisis that has prompted repeated public inquiries into the quality of patient care. Correlating workforce-to-population ratios with medicolegal burden, and drawing on Canadian Medical Association wellness survey data, this study ranks pathology against 17 wellness indicators across all specialties. The findings are stark: from 2006–2010 to 2016–2020, medicolegal complaints rose 33% nationally against a 16.7% workforce increase, with British Columbia seeing a 127% rise in complaints against just 9.4% workforce growth. Pathologists ranked worst on 14 of 17 wellness indicators.
Pathologists reported the lowest levels of psychological well-being and the highest rates of distress of any specialty — a 2.44-fold increased risk of low psychological well-being compared to other physicians. Addressing this crisis requires systemic reform, workload-based contracts, and mental health protections to sustain both physician wellness and the quality of patient care.
