Despite just writing a paragraph about it, this blog entry wasn't meant to be about the impact of journals and articles. It was about the impact we have on patients. Sometimes, I think it's easy to get wrapped up in the numbers and figures. A busy day of surgical receiving becomes 4 query appendicitis, 6 diverticulitis, a renal colic, the stab wound in A&E and 3 from GP still to be seen. Another 5 blood results awaited, 3 abdominal films to chase and would radiology please hurry up and report that CT scan. Yes, we care about our patients deeply, but sometimes what we do becomes so routine that we may forget that although this is our 24th acute abdomen, for the patient it's the first time in hospital or the most terrifying thing they've ever experienced. Even for those patients who we see regularly - the chronic pancreatitis after another alcohol binge, the poorly controlled Crohn's disease desperate to avoid a stoma - their interaction with the health service is likely to have a significantly greater impact on them than it does on us.
I was recently in a bar with a colleague when a lady approached us. "I know you" she said to him. He looked momentarily embarrassed and I assumed he had no idea who she was. Her next sentence took me (although I suspect not him) by surprise. "You're the doctor who saved my husband's life". I didn't go into details with him about what had happened, but it was clear that in the course of going about his daily work he had made a huge difference to this family (and, I suspect, many others). She was very pleasant, updated him with how things were, wished us a good night (and said it was great to see that doctors were humans who you saw drinking in pubs in town like normal people - but that's definitely a different topic...) and went on her way. I was surprised by how very uncomfortable my colleague seemed with this. He muttered something about "just doing my job" to me and returned to his pint.
The "just a job" attitude is an incredibly difficult one to get right. After more and more guidelines about what we can say on Twitter or the photos we shouldn't put on Facebook, many doctors have become fed up with the constant attempts to control our out of work lives. This has resulted in many of us (myself included) taking the staunch position of "it's only a job". I don't think that this is wrong. I go to work, do my job and hopefully do it well, and then I go home to the kind of social life I choose. I don't believe that drinking more than my recommended alcohol intake or (god forbid) having a cheeky cigarette makes me less competent at what I do. Where this attitude falls down, though, is that it makes us more likely to forget how important what we do is. We're privileged enough to be involved in some of the most important times of families' lives. Let's not forget the impact each of our interactions will have on a patient and their loved ones.
