For those for whom it doesn’t load, the image reads:
Dressed in blue scrubs, it’s hard to believe that only an hour earlier the speciclty doctor was on the school run - dropping off her children to nearby schools in Bromley and Beckenham (Greater London). She is briefed on where she is working that day. Like all ememrgency departments in the NHS, the PRUH is under extreme pressure. Hospital staff see approximately 5,500 patients a month and another 900 under-18s are seen in the paediatric ED.
(can anyone find the whole article?)
Articles like this give the impression that some adults never grow out of the assumption that their teacher’s life only exists at school, the doctor lives in the GP surgery etc. And yet, it’s a good example of how, by focusing on doctors as a role, a standard to live up to, we forget to see them as people. Fallible, fragile and utterly as human as anyone else.
Perhaps the idealised image of doctors developed as a way to encourage people to trust us. After all, as I’ve said in replies to recent asks, it’s actually pretty weird that when you see a doctor, you’ll walk into a room with a stranger, share lots of things you’ve probably never told anyone, and probably show them bits of your body that you don’t show to many people. That’s a huge amount of trust in another human being. And in order to trust these people, society has enforced on them a strict set of ethical rules (which is absolutely necessary; I want my doctor to not be a rapist, too, and I don’t want rapists anywhere near patients in general) but it’s also historically enforced on doctors lots of expectations for what a doctor should be like that aren’t necessarily strictly grounded in law and ethics. And that’s where the difficulties start. The romanticised idea of what a doctor should be.
And yet, if we look at the way people often talk about doctors online, you’d see that this isn’t just an isolated incident. People assume doctors don’t know what it’s like to be sick, or have loved ones who are sick, or stresses in their lives. We work silly hours, have to keep putting in silly amounts of effort to keep progressing at our jobs, and deal with life and death as well as beaurocracy. We’re more likely to be mentally ill than the general population. We get ill too; doctors with chronic illnesses exist please stop making out that they don’t just because they don’t tell you about it, illness is not a performance art, it does not need to be justified to strangers to exist. Our families and friends have problems. Our relationships can suffer. Our cars break down. We aren’t without privilege, but our lives are not protected from misfortune, pain or chaos; we just have to fit it around our 12h shifts and hope our world doesn’t burn down whilst we’re at work.
It really shouldn’t surprise anyone that some doctors have kids, or that all doctors have a life outside of work. Catch me in Starbucks looking haggard after a set of nights but trying to make it to a social get-together anyway. Catch us on a night out, looking absolutely stunning in something we’d never wear at work, and just living life as normal people. And yet, there’s a huge stigma behind doctors being open about who they are outside of their job role; there’s a stigma around being open about our own health issues, particularly mental health. And there’s a genuine fear amongst most doctors that one must always, always keep their personal and professional personas quite separate. Unfortunately, that also means that as a profession we end up coming across as dry, sanctimonious and devoid of any life experience or interests in our own right; when the reality is that we don’t really feel that we’re allowed to, lest someone take issue. Which they probably will do; remember the outraged tabloid articles complaining that some of the doctors leading discussion in the contract dispute went on holidays, drank alcohol or uh, had interests or side-jobs or did anything other than work as doctors 100% of the time? I do.
And god forbid you’re a woman doctor who decides to go part time; then you’re basically persona non-grata for personally failing the NHS by not giving them 100% of your possible work hours and therefore singlehandedly ruining the NHS through understaffing. The numbers of people burning out, leaving for working abrod or just plain getting sick of UK doctorhood and picking a less stressful job never quite gets mentioned in this context. If you want us to stay working in medicine, then make it less horrific; don’t you dare paint us as cowards for burning out in a system that sets up many to fail.
And this is why the narrative about vocations is often harmful. The idea that something ‘should be a calling’ is often used to imply that people doing certain jobs should shut up and put up with the conditions they work in, because they should be so obsessed with the job that merely doing it should be reward enough. That it’s meant to consume you, because if it’s not consuming you, you’re just not dedicated enough. There was a lot of rhetoric questioning doctors’ motives and vocation around the time the contract dispute happened because apparently doctors are only meant to care about helping people, and mundane earthly details like not wanting to be paid less than last year for doing the same (or more) work was meant to be beneath us. Which then paves the way for working conditions to be eroded, because well, we’re supposed to be above caring about those kinds of things, aren’t we?
But we’re not, because we’re human.
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