Crossing boundaries: Family physicians' struggles to protect their private lives

OBJECTIVE: To explore the tensions between professional and personal boundaries and how they affect the work and private lives of family physicians. DESIGN: Qualitative case study using semistructured interviews. SETTING: Province of New Brunswick. PARTICIPANTS: Forty-eight family physicians from across the province. METHODS: A collective case-study approach was developed, with 24 cases of 2 individuals per case. Cases were selected based on sex, location (urban or rural), language (French or English), and number of years since medical school graduation (< 10 years, 10 to 20 years, or >20 years). Physicians were interviewed in either French or English. Participants were recruited using the College of Physicians and Surgeons of New Brunswick's physician directory. Based on the rates of response and participation, some cases were overrepresented, while others were not completed. All interviews were audiotaped, transcribed verbatim, and analyzed thematically using a categorical aggregation approach. A coding scheme for the thematic analysis was developed by the research team before the interviews were transcribed. MAIN FINDINGS: Almost all of the family physicians interviewed discussed how their profession negatively affected their personal lives. Many struggled with issues such as heavy workloads, the adverse effects of their profession on their family lives, and the trespassing of patients onto their personal lives in small towns and rural communities. Some physicians had developed strategies to balance their personal lives with their professional demands; however, this often meant reducing work hours or terminating certain shifts, such as those in the emergency department or after-hours clinics. CONCLUSION: Family physicians struggle to keep their profession from intruding too much into their private lives. These struggles are important to acknowledge and address in order to avoid physician burnout and premature retirement from clinical practice.