The Power of Mindset in Medical Profession by Dr Iraniha
I love this quote by Sir William Osler, the father of modern medicine, who once said “medicine arose out of primal sympathy of man with man; out of the desire to help those in sorrow, need and sickness. This relationship arises out of pain and suffering of one person and offer of hope by another”. This quote beautifully summarizes who we are supposed to be and what we really here to do as the health care professionals. But let me ask every one of you whether you really feel this way in our current health care system. I`m sure most of us feel that way when we initially seek to master this profession, but as we are introduced into this extremely complicated health care system, we lose sight of our core values.By dropping into this system, our priorities do change.
We are placed as a part, somewhere in this incredibly complex machine and even though our positions and our responsibilities are extremely important in the smooth function of this system, Soon we realize that we are a replaceable part of a system with no human soul and our work and effort do not matter, we give in our identity, overlook our main priorities and function just as a piece in this giant organization. Wasn’t the medicine supposed to be a profession arising from compassion with incredible desire to help, create authentic human connection, and offer hope to others? Wasn’t this profession supposed to make us feel proud, alive and content, give us the reason to withstand the daily struggles, pain, suffering, exhaustion and frustration, and motivate us to do what we are called to do with open arms, embracing the daily challenges for something extraordinary, above and beyond ourselves, something remarkable, “the purpose”? So how come in reality this is not the case and instead, mostly we feel exhausted, underappreciated, overworked and frustrated.
This system is giving in its human soul and as time goes by and the complexity of our health care system increases and the technology takes over more, human relationship will lose its presence and we are going to see and feel more of this sense of indifference and lack of motivation and contentment in our profession and that at the end, would lead to more patient dissatisfaction. So please explain to me in this system, when we, as the health care professionals can`t feel alive, proud and content for what we do, what would motivate us to create any type of human experience for our patients. The remarkable human experience in our patients arises out of our compassion, connection, care and kindness. It should not be fake, it cannot be generated by rules, policies and procedures and it is not about creating complicated surveys, nice charts and graphics. I know there are significant efforts to measure these values in order to introduce new ways to improve the patient experience, but trust me it is hard to measure feelings. How can anyone measure love, compassion or kindness? It has to be generated out of our soul, it has to be genuine, it`s supposed to be “human experience”.
As the health care professionals, we are responsible to restore the humanity back into our health care system and revive our core values and priorities. So first and foremost, we must re frame our mindset about who we are, our role in this system, what we are called to do in our profession, and our core values and priorities and then seek our personal contentment by accepting this incredible profession as the opportunity to help others and create an amazing human experience for ourselves and our patients. We must practice to remind ourselves of our core values in a daily basis and command our inner voice to embrace the daily challenges as the opportunity to help others, create valuable human connections and relationships, seek to accomplish greatness in what we do and explore positive human emotions and by doing so, pursue personal contentment. Even though we cannot stop the changes in this giant health care system we are able to revive its core, its human soul. And if we, as the health care professionals believe in the same values and change our mindset at our workplace, only then we can create an amazing culture to cultivate the “human experience”.
