2024-02-25 04:01:02
It seems clear that medicine cannot be lived as a vocation or as a job absolutely. It is not a dichotomy, but rather a dialectical, dynamic relationship is established that will change throughout professional life. And that also implies important questions, while examines the role of work in our lives and how we gain satisfaction from itthe only one we have and are going to have.
What is undoubted is that, increasingly, We doctors have been losing a sense of fulfillment as we develop our vocation, to find ourselves like pieces of a gear, simple officials with no prospects for development or improvement. Work in the hospital or primary care, at many times the center of our lives, of our identity, has become for many a burden that must be suffered. In a demoralizing reality that, at best, is an honest way to make a living, and little else.
Structural scourges
The pandemic, even though at the beginning it partially gave us back our service identity (see the applause and recognition of the doctors’ efforts), rather amplified the problems of the profession: poor working conditions, insecurity, absence of decision-making capacity and influence in the decisions that affect us, the conviction that “the system” fails and does not allow us to work as we would like. These criticisms, all of them well-founded, but sometimes diffuse, reflect a malaise long before the pandemic.
In moments like this, of dissatisfaction and confusion, It is necessary to remember that our loyalty and commitment is to patients. Not with the institutions in which we work, when they fail (us), but with human lives that are in need. This is the message to convey to doctors in training, who sooner or later will take care of the sick human beings we care for today, and even of ourselves when we get sick. They must also know that, without effort, without dedication, they will not acquire the skills necessary to be competent doctors.
Commitment to the other
The call to the vocation is not a form of manipulation (there are others that one day I will describe), but the reminder that medicine is based on the commitment to our sick fellow human beings, above salaries, working conditions, frustrations, disappointments and discouragements. . Ultimately, I have to ask myself: How will I want myself or the people I love to be treated when they need care?
In moments of difficulty and tribulation we must return, if it existed, to love first, and ask ourselves why we choose Medicine. Make aware that Our commitment is not with the third world, nor with an imaginary patient, but with daily work in this Spain of the 21st century.sometimes expensive and harsh.
Pray for the sick and for those who care for them.
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