You, like everyone else in this industry, have probably been a part of conversations about physician fatigue and hospital safety in the recent weeks. There has been growing pressure in our system. This critical mass of media has started some rather interesting conversations amongst colleagues. Of particular interest, for the first time in a very long time, some consultants have started opening up about their own experiences.
I wonder now, as a very junior trainee, how often consultants are able to hark back to their days of training and have frank discussions about the difficulties they faced, or if these conversations are often tinted with the rose-colour of retrospection. How easy was it being the only person on call, in days before mobile phones and e-orders and everyone having two cars in their household? How easy was it to check up on sick patients before the era of external EMR access? What did they do when UpToDate and all of the internet were not available within seconds to answer questions about forgotten facts or unknown pathologies?
Our seniors have been there to guide us and to train us – sometimes with kindness, sometimes with hard love. How often do we make time to reflect and appreciate their human experience?
We have probably all read the articles about our colleague Dr Kadota and how she struggled with unrelenting working conditions in her job last year. Many of my surgical colleagues have paused reading her story, not because these hours seem particularly outlandish, but because (aside from the long stretches of on-call) many have worked similarly long back-to-back days. And, in our little posses discussing work-sleep balance, it becomes clearer how experiences differ. The age-old saying, “do something you love and you’ll never work a day in your life” is less true than the experienced “work with a team that gels well together, and the day will pass more pleasantly.” A fourteen-hour day with a team that enjoys each others’ company and is productive is far more pleasurable than a four-hour day with a dysfunctional unit. It’s not so much about the quantity but the quality of the experience.
I am hopeful that these conversations continue.
As I progress through the health system, I become more and more responsible for the well-being of my more junior colleagues. I feel the anxiety of the new interns bringing me their referrals. I feel their nervousness not knowing exactly what they are asking for or what they should be telling me. I also feel the personal rejection that emanates from them when I ask for objective data that is unavailable, and remember feeling similarly hurt when I was in their shoes. But now that I’m here, I realise that these questions are fact-finding missions that bear no ill against the caller. The more information gathered over the phone, the easier it is to give advice, but the lack of information does not make me angry. It is just is what it is. I am never quite sure if gentle advice is taken in good faith or as a personal attack. And, from seeing altercations between colleagues before, I know that the intended sentiment can be lost between two people not knowing each other very well and not always reflecting on the other person’s stress, workload, or personal struggles.
And so it is that we must learn to forgive ourselves and others, and to recognise that a perceived altercation is not always an intended insult. It may not even be perceived as negative by the other soul.
And so, this week, instead of proffering articles, I am interested to hear your experiences at work and how we can make each other’s lives easier.
