The challenge of Ethics for Doctors

Finding a Job as a Doctor 

Qualifying for a Doctor’s degree is a hard and long journey every doctor would be hard pressed to deny this. Specialising in a specific area like ENT, Gynecologist, Urologist etc. etc. is even harder. Finding a job in today’s cut throat competitive market is so tough that finding a job is itself a “Big Job!” Once all these challenges are successfully met comes the next BIG challenge “Sustaining the Job.”

Challenges in medical profession 

No Job is easy and all professions come with their set of unique challenges. Take for instance a bus driver. The driver has a huge responsibility on his/her shoulder to ensure safely transporting passengers to their destiny.  Same with an airline Pilot. The teacher is responsible for educating and grooming a future generation. The profession of medicine is no exception only that compared with most professions it has a longer list of challenges. The diagnose and prescription of correct medicine, the precision care taken in a surgery which does not admit of any negligence and the list goes on. The object of this blog is to consider the ethics involved in dealing with patients.

How to deal with patients from diverse backgrounds

Ethics is a set of moral principles. Whilst dealing with patients from diverse backgrounds, The Doctor on duty is under obligation to perform his professional services that conform to the highest moral principles. Practicing medicine is not limited to diagnosing and curing the patient. It’s also a great deal to do with moral support. Patients who report physical complications need affection and kindness. Let humans alone, even animals in pain demand moral support. The anecdote of Androcles and the lion is a moral lesson of “Do good have good” that has trickled down to us from ages and ingrained in human psyche.

Moral Duty of Doctor 

The legend of Florence of Nightingale is a testimony of human compassion and benevolence that lives on to this day. So from this we can safely conclude that the first moral duty of a doctor is to show unconditional compassion and kindness to patients. Love and kindness often proves more effective than medicines.

Challenges faced in patient care

While showing compassion and kindness is a flat rate gesture and, as I see it, does not entail any complications, there are cases which demand more than compassion and smile. These cases range from dealing with patients from different social /religious background wounded with psychological scars that merit extreme care in handling their situation.
Let me draw a case scenario. A house wife is shifted to hospital with wounds inflicted by an abusive husband. The husband is hiding and children are emotionally petrified at home. The wife is in physical and psychological agony.
In this sad and gripping scenario, the doctor has to provide for her physical and mental wounds. Should the doctor call the police? Should the doctor provide her personal counselling or first take her consent or seek help from someone whom he /she deems more competent? These and other questions need to be taken very seriously.
This is just one scenario with the intent to give an idea of how cases get complicated on account of social circumstances.
One problem a doctor can confront is dealing with a patient with different religious beliefs. The doctors and patients beliefs may be repugnant to each other. But the doctor has to demonstrate highest ultruism dealing with such cases in which patients social /religious beliefs are in conflict with that of the service provider.

Doctors ethical treatment 

The list of these challenging cases is endless and there are no easy solutions. But they are not impossible either. Here at BeMRCOG, the mentor Dr. Asma Naqi over the years has taken pain and trouble to master the art of providing patients treatment in ethical frame work.  She has a burning passion to help people in need and that helps to explain why she understands how to best handle patients ethically. To learn more please log on to: www.bemrcog.com

The Untold Secret to Success

Once in a while, right in the middle of an ordinary day, life gives us a fairy-tale.

Writing something is not hard, but writing what you actually mean is a very hard job. It took me a while before I could decide whether or not to share this blog post. I wasn’t sure if I would find appropriate words to share this real life fairy-tale in which a busy doctor suddenly finds the invisible key to success.

I am in a habit of writing a reflective blog on the last day of every year; looking back critically, evaluating achievements & failures and setting a couple of new year’s resolutions. Reflecting back on 2016 turned out to be a fairy tale when I suddenly discovered the secret to success & happiness.

2016 was a set of 365 transformational days in every area of my life. As you are reading this blog on BeMRCOG platform, so let’s use this aspect as an example to take you through my fairy-tale discovery. Here are the snippets of some achievements in 2016:

• My little baby BeMRCOG grew up from a website to a UK-based organisation when it got registered as a limited company.
• This generated a new dimension to my personal growth when I took over as the Managing Director of the company, while remaining the Founder of Website and the Mentor of BeMRCOG courses.
• BeMRCOG courses got CPD accredited, a massive credibility! (The only other accredited course for MRCOG exam preparation is StratOG).
• We established ‘Student Support Services’ and ‘Quality Assurance’ along with other departments, to add a lot more value to our existing services.
• I started live events in the form of online workshops and intensive courses, enabling many students to get a high quality evidence-based learning experience right from the comfort of their home, on a very affordable cost.
• The convenience and quality of these live events boosted the pass rate of written exam up to 80%, which is a very high rate for non-UK based candidates as compared to an average of 30-40%.
• MRCOG part 3 course was created and launched keeping in lines with the new exam pattern. I am proud to continue being the ONLY provider of a comprehensive course that teaches OSCE skills in fine details, in contrast to the traditional mock circuit practice courses.

The list of ‘achievements’ was jaw dropping and I was forced to think of the factors behind this success. I have not listed these achievements to blow my own horn, but to take you with me through the thought process that led to the discovery.

Some of you might be thinking at this point that I might be a very career oriented woman so what’s the big deal if I achieved all of this in one year. Ironically, and as a matter of fact, I am neither a career woman nor did I make grandiose plans to be where I am today. It has been like a snowball right from the time I started these courses as a small home-based study group sitting around my dining table, to this point where it is converted into an internationally renowned organisation in just 5 years.

So, then how did this happen?

Was it hard work?
Yes, possibly so. I am a workaholic and I literally get withdrawal symptoms if I don’t do anything productive for more than 5 minutes.

Could it be good planning?
My understanding of good planning = details + organisation. I am a detail-oriented person and like to be very organised. Name anything, be it my thoughts, my drawers, my desk, my shelf, my files, my folders; I am organised to fine details of everything.

How about a positive attitude?
Hmmm, sounds quite possible. I simply don’t know any other attitude but a positive one, even towards the most devastating situations.

Does Innovation count?
Monotony is static, what is static is dead. I cannot be dead while I am alive. So yeah, innovation goes without saying.

Are you forgetting Passion?
Yessss, it must be passion. Passion must be the secret behind all the above mentioned factors and hence the secret behind success.

To me the word achievement is interchangeable with success. Success brings happiness. Yayy, I found the key to happiness and success. Passion is the key. But hey, wait a minute. I have passion for what I do here at BeMRCOG, but my success and happiness is not limited to this platform. The pattern remains the same in every area of my life. Then what is it?

You might be thinking that I am just lucky and have never had failures, disappointments and difficulties in my life. Trust me, I am not bullet proof. I have sustained many hard blows, even in this last year 2016, but I’ve always survived though every bullet without ever losing a grain of enthusiasm. It has to be something more than passion. Something … that does not let me feel failed, disappointed and discouraged. Something that makes me step out of my comfort zone and thrive even in the most unfavourable conditions. It has to be something that operates behind everything I do in life and passion is perhaps just one of them. It has to be the driving force behind my passion. What is the driving force behind my passion?

And in the quest of the key behind success, I went on and on …. & on…. until I made the most interesting discovery of my life – THE DRIVING FORCE! The force that operates behind everything I do from the moment I wake up till I exhaust back to sleep. In my case, this driving force is ‘giving’. I am a very giving person by nature, I love to give whatever I could to anyone who crosses my path. Although, I have been misused, misunderstood, misinterpreted and mistreated because of this nature; but instead of reacting against my nature, I learned how to modify my ways of giving. The same force operates behind my passion as a teacher – giving. When this is what brings me happiness, everything else goes in the background, and in the grand scheme of things I end up being surrounded with achievements/success/happiness. Now scroll back and look again at the list of achievements and I’m sure you will not miss to see the invisible ‘driving force’ in action behind each one of them.

The bottom line of my fairy-tale is: Sky used to be the limit, now it’s my point of view. Do you want to change your point of view? If yes, then discover your driving force and live happily ever after. ☺

Dr. Asma Naqi

http://bemrcog.com/the-untold-secret-to-success/