Olivia Ong

About

Known as the Heart-Centred Doctor, Dr Olivia Ong is a professional speaker, author, and physician with a thriving medical practice in Melbourne, Australia. After a serious car accident in 2008, Dr Ong became a paraplegic but began walking again 3 years later. She resumed her career in 2013 and became an accomplished dual-trained rehabilitation and pain management physician. She wrote her first book “The Heart-Centredness of Medicine” about physician burnout, and today Dr Ong also runs programs helping doctors transform their lives from burnout to brilliance. She speaks on burnout in the healthcare industry and has appeared in the media regularly including Sky News, Channel 10, Yahoo Finance, ThriveGlobal, International Business Times Singapore, and Australian Business Journal. She has been a guest on multiple podcasts and speaks about resilience, overcoming her spinal cord injury, and compassionate leadership, with which she leads her medical teams wholeheartedly.

KeyNote

Self-Compassion as a Likely Antidote to Burnout The time has come to reaffirm the humanity of doctors and acknowledge their value to society. Medical culture and the healthcare system both need to change – that’s the bottom line. Doctors must first acknowledge, and then heal, their pain and suffering with self-compassion. They have to do this for their own sake first and then for the sake of their patients and communities. Dr Ong’s mission is to arm doctors and other medical professionals with the tools they need to tap into the heart-centredness of medicine. Self-compassion entails acknowledging that we are suffering, that we are all in it together and that we need to love and be kind to ourselves before we can really do the same for others. For the first time in her life, Dr Ong found a place of peace and power within herself through self-compassion. She believes that creating a ripple effect from self-compassion is the best way forward for us as a collective. Essentially, self-compassion is the antidote to burnout.