Special needs for us or assess and treat all patients as individuals?

Tuffrey-Wijne nicely highlights some of the issues arising when a healthcare professional becomes a long-term patient.¹ The older we get, the more relevant her experience will become. In days of yore, through instruments such as Mental Health Officer status, doctors’ ‘special needs’ were acknowledged and addressed by a caring NHS employer. Today, thankfully, we are no longer seen as special, but alas neither are we looked after as different. All patients are different, yet medical training lumps us all together, using the medical model, under descriptors of convenience called diagnoses. We are dehumanised in training in order to become ‘better/detached’ doctors and we pay a price for that when we become patients ourselves.

Instead of shielding ourselves from the individual humanity of our patients, it would be better to have personal insight development, self-care skills, and resilience-building at the core of our training. This would enable us to open up our humanity to work better and last longer. We would make much more efficacious use of that metaphorical drug, the Doctor. If we never learn how, or worse still in today’s NHS are not allowed, to look after ourselves properly, what hope is there of becoming the best doctor we can be, for all our patients, not just for our colleagues as patients? Much better to keep the battery topped up than to repeatedly drain it flat, perhaps to a point beyond repair.