Читать книгу Start & Run a Medical Practice - Michael Clifford Fabian - Страница 32

You have to want to help patients because that is something you truly want to do, without the expectation of any kind of appreciation in return. So let’s imagine you in this position:

You are a family physician working in a small rural community. There is one hospital in town, and you are covering the Emergency Room (ER) for the night. While attending a birthday celebration for one of your children, you are called urgently to the ER to attend to a passenger injured in a motor vehicle accident. You arrive at the ER to find a young woman lying in a neck brace, speaking appropriately and moving all her limbs. You investigate for many things over the next three hours, including a possible neck injury. In this case you decide the patient is stable enough to stay in the local hospital overnight.

You talk to the patient’s family to give them an update of the situation. More family members have arrived, and you now have about ten people staring you in the face and looking rather worried, which is totally understandable. If this was my sister, mother, or friend I would be worried too. While you try to tell them what is going on, they seem frustrated that you do not have more specific answers as to the exact nature of the patient’s injuries. The family also expresses concern about why you are taking care of this patient in the local hospital, and have not transferred her to the “big city hospital.” During all of this conversation, nobody has acknowledged that you have just spent three hours trying to figure out what’s going on with the patient, and little do they know that you left your own child’s birthday party to attend to their family member so compassionately and diligently. Up until now, none of the family has said the words “thank you.”

Such a situation might be upsetting for some doctors, particularly early on in their career. However, you have to understand that this family is under a lot of stress over their wife, mother, daughter, and sister being in an accident, with the exact nature of her injuries still to be confirmed. Appreciation on the part of patients and/or their loved ones might not be in the equation, at least in the short term, and you have to be fully aware of this concept before you go into medicine. There are different areas in medicine in which similar situations occur.

Don’t get me wrong — many patients appreciate what you do, but every now and again this type of situation occurs. Every doctor has his or her own story and personal take on this. So, choose medicine because you want to help people, and not because you want to receive gratitude and recognition for it. This concept is not unique to medicine, but can be of relevance to some of the other health-care fields as well.