Rhiannon Ashman

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45 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Aug 2026 last heard 7 Aug

Rhiannon Ashman’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.

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Talking General Practice · Pursuing a GP career after recovering from addiction · 7 Aug 2026 podcast

I'm Rhiannon Ashman, Deputy Editor of MIMS Learning, and I'm really pleased to have Dr Michael Blackmore with me today to talk about addiction and recovery, specifically looking at how this can affect medical professionals.

Michael is a GP partner, RCGP Chair of West Scotland Faculty, and is himself a recovering addict.

Welcome to the podcast, Michael.

I really appreciate you being here.

So on this podcast, regular listeners will know we often focus on tips to provide the best clinical care for your patients.

But as the saying goes, you can't pour from an empty cup.

And with recent changes to GP appraisals, placing greater focus on health care professionals, well-being and compassion and respect for colleagues, I thought it was important to cover this topic.

So although we're much more aware of the risks of burnout and stress among people in the profession these days, addiction seems to me to be a bit of a problem that's hiding in plain sight.

And that's also why I'm so grateful to have come across Michael, who I know you've been so generous in sharing your own experiences with colleagues over the years and you're going to talk to us today.

So Michael, as I said in the intro, you've been very open about sharing your own experiences with addiction.

And I think that for many clinicians, there's a sense of it's not going to happen to me because of their training.

So do you have any idea of the sorts of numbers, percentages that are affected in the profession?

Is there something about the kind of traits that are often found in healthcare professionals, you know, like being very driven, maybe perfectionism, perhaps being a bit hard on yourselves, combined with the kind of work hard, play hard, medical school thing, does that potentially put healthcare professionals at an increased risk of those coping mechanisms, like you said?

Yeah.

So if you're looking back at your early career, you're happy to share kind of how your relationship, I believe, was it alcohol and drugs that you were addicted to, how that kind of developed and, you know, whether there was a point at which you realised that this has gone beyond the coping mechanisms that other people might be employing.

And

When you're describing that situation where you're using increasingly large amounts, you're still practising medicine at this point.

You described yourself as a functioning addict at one point, right?

So how were you kind of managing that and the pressures of the job and the decisions?

Will you tell us a bit more about that when you did seek help and what that looked like kind of logistically and how it worked out?

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