I am not insensible to how difficult the job of a physician is in general, and a surgeon’s job in particular, but guess what?
People have jobs that impinge on their personal lives, are difficult to deliver with encompassing perfection, and the outcomes of their professional efforts can have an impact on people, especially if they don’t do their job to perfection.
An airline pilot? A ship’s captain? A bridge or building architect?
The list could go on.
But if you decide to take a job as a surgeon, you better get it through your head that when you are being depended on to do you job which you get well compensated for, your time is not your own when your profession calls. Expecially if you took that job to fulfill a surgical task that people’s lives may well depend on.
If she isn’t tough enough or dedicated enough to accept that, she needs to find another job. I don’t want her to be my surgeon if I am in a car wreck. They pay surgeons a lot of money, and there is a reason for that. Because when the pager goes off at 3 AM, you are not only available sound asleep in your bed, you jump out of bed and get to the hospital because PEOPLE’S LIVES DEPEND ON YOU.
You don’t want that responsibility, GET THE HELL OUT OF THE PROFESSION.
Sorry. The tone of this article just pissed me off. She wanted the money, prestige, and respect, but didn’t want the work.
I hear you.
If it’s that difficult to put patients first, then find another career.
Of course, doctors being overloaded is the fault of the medical community. They do everything in their power to weed out people and thus there’s a shortage of doctors, so they end up being overworked.
I don’t need, nor want, a doctor who can do marathon shifts during residency. I want a GOOD doctor who will have enough time for patients and I suspect there there are a lot of really good men and women who are weeded out because of the system.
If doctors are overworked, blame the system that created the shortage of doctors in the first place.
Wendy is my cousin.
I helped her do some of the preliminary research for her book. I have some decent experience in senior level management and behavior of people in stressful management situations.
What I told her when I looked at her research is that I had seen this type of stuff during many years of mergers and acquisitions. It is pretty common from people who were senior managers in an acquired company. All of a sudden, they were not the hot shit masters of the universe they used to be. Now…they were just a dog in the much larger machine.
The problem in the medical field is that these people have been told they were “the best” since middle school. All through college and medical school their training and abilities were driven in one direction: To be almost God Like. They work their asses off to get through med school, residency, getting certified and licensed..and then….they are tossed on the midnight shift in the ED and they are managed like “a cog in the machine.”
Now, my politics have never been in line with Wendy’s. But, she is the smartest and hardest working person I have ever known in my life. During my wife’s complicated medical issues, she was always there to help interpret results and give sound advice. He takes her moral obligation as a physician seriously.
Her book was written for the medical field. I worked in a short time in that field. My interactions with the clinical staff was interesting. The hospital had gone through a recent “merger.” The atmosphere was very familiar to me.
I saw up close how the clinical staff reacted to having their world turned upside down. Their reactions and complaints were literally the same as a call center supervisor in an acquired bank. These folks were smart about a lot of clinical things. But they were horribly naive about how businesses worked. Not all of them “survived” and they went off to find new homes.
The answer to this issue is educating these new docs in Medical school. They need to be made aware of the Medical Business. They need to have their expectations “adjusted.”
So, Wendy is a good, smart, and dedicated woman. In her context, she addresses what is new to her peers. From the outside looking in we look at this and say, “Duh…welcome to the corporate game.”