e 3 a s h i g R E F L E C T I O N S

In The Deep End

I have been quite busy recently that I could not update. The first few weeks at work were somewhat light, giving me the time to have a life and do things outside work but the later weeks were hectic, with 1 in 6 on-calls for 24 hours (one day out of every 6 days including the weekend) in addition to management on-call duties. Those have nothing to do with medicine and if it was not for the nature of our hospital, I would have thought they are a total waste of time. They expose us to administrative things that we don’t usually have to think about. I did it once for 24 hours and hated it. I feel sorry for my boss who is practically on call for this sort of thing 24/7.

In my hospital, I believe, the standard of care is excellent. Patients ask to be transferred from all over the country to us because they appreciate how we work. Everyone tries their best to save lives, which is extremely difficult when people turn up in your clinic and stop you in the corridors without appointment expecting you to leave everything you are doing and see them. “But he has cancer doctor, please see him” yes, everyone has cancer, this is actually a cancer clinic, and if I see your dad without an appointment then I have to move someone from today’s list down the line. One thing that surely irritates me is patients’ relatives. For some reason, they believe it’s their right to get doctors to speak to everyone in the family individually, 5 times aday to repeat the same thing. (Multiply 10 patients * 5 demanding relatives * 10 minutes each). When people are not happy with what you say, the next thing you hear is: “I am well connected doctor; I know Sheikh X or Sheikh Y”. I never seen people advertising their connections to get you to do things for them in my 10 years of medical training.

I am also disappointed by other hospitals in Abu Dhabi. Few days ago, I tried to shift a patient who was in a very critical condition and needed an intensive care bed that we don’t have into one of the three neighbouring hospitals and they all refused. One of them actually had no shame in saying they had a bed but they will not accept the patient because his chances of survival are very slim.

It’s not all bad. People do appreciate what we do. Boss is very patient and understanding to both patients and doctor’s need and he tries his very best to please everyone and it sorts of cascades down the organization. Nurses here are far more competent than NHS nurses and it does help a great a lot when you are having a bad night. I find morning meetings fascinating as our consultants come from all corners of the globe and each was trained differently. It is interesting to see the different opinions of the same clinical scenario.