Mental health: Who doctors the doctors?
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Loading... - Evelyn Nassoro
- 30 Aug 2022
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Three years ago, the world was ravaged by a global pandemic of epic proportions and countless lives were lost as we stood by watching helplessly and with fear.
Lockdowns helped many of us stay a little safer but also saw medical practitioners see and feel the brunt of the pandemic harder than anyone else on the planet.
We called them frontline workers and yes, they were our real life heroes but the burden and weight placed on medical practitioners is not one we can take lightly.
Even though the pandemic brought intensified mental agony, the reality is doctors still go through gruelling experiences every day.
To many of us, they are obliged to take care of us because that is what they signed up for and as a patient, when a medic delays attending to you, more often than not, blame and complaints of incompetency and lack of dedication to patients go around.
During the pandemic, we saw nurses and medics post and share videos of how challenging it is to work during that period and how isolated they were as they cared for patients.
Many of these nurses talked about the toll that the situation has had on their mental health and quite a number had shared that they did experience suicidal thoughts just to escape the gruesomeness of it all.
Yet they still committed to continue taking care of their patients.
However, I have learnt the very important lesson that should you walk a mile in a doctor’s shoe, many wouldn’t last a minute.
From seeing sick babies, still born babies, youths with promising futures struggle with things we take for granted, cancer patients or even losing patients in the emergency room while the waiting corridors are ever swamped with moaning or patients wailing in pain, medical practitioners see, hear and experience things many of us can’t even begin to imagine possible.
These people play the role of caretakers, healers, counsellors and even psychologists all at once in an effort to help a patient feel their best much quicker.
Their empathic ability calls on to them to wake up the next day and see more patients or spend 72-hour shifts working to save lives.
Questions arise
The questions that arise then are where do they get that resilience to keep moving forward and who helps them unpack all the trauma they see on the daily?
Why aren’t we talking and taking proactive measures for the mental health of the very people to whom we expect expert care from? When are we going to step out of our way to do for medical practitioners the very thing we demand of them? Read More…
