How to Excel as a New Doctor

If you think that by finishing med school and starting your residency things are about to get easier then you’re wrong. Being a new doctor can be scary, frustrating, and really fun at the same time. You’re finally achieving your dream of being a physician and improving the lives of others. It can be pretty scary at first and that’s why your work is supervised by senior doctors until you grow into the role and don’t need supervision anymore. At the same time you’re overloaded with lots of other tasks that don’t include patient contact such as filling paperwork and doing your attending’s requests. At the same time the incredibly long working hours and lack of sleep can actually lead to burnout and depression which will not just affect your morale but also your output at work. It’s important to stay positive and happy when things get tough and you start to lose sight of why you became a doctor. It would be great if your supervisor inspires you and provides you with support and guidance. It’s important to make friends with fellow residents too and make sure to motivate each other. Spend as much time as you can with patients talking to them and trying to help them, this is why you became a doctor and underwent so much training and education after all.

The long hours and paperwork will definitely be some of the worst things if not the absolute worst about your first years as a doctor. You have to fill in each patient’s file and make sure everything is correct which will of course take lots of time, especially patient time. This task is essential, however; because it helps keep all of a patient’s data intact and arranged chronologically so that in the future we have his or her medical record without anything missing. Otherwise if we stopped having medical records things would be chaotic and the quality of care we can provide to patients will significantly decrease. Things like family history and what a patient’s allergic to may be lost or forgotten which can lead to serious consequences. Then there’s the long hours of work which will leave you sleep deprived and exhausted. A lot of residents report actually forgetting to eat for very long durations due to the high workload. It’s hard to imagine working so hard that you forget to eat, but if you don’t have a minute to yourself for over 12 hours then food probably won’t be on your mind. So you need to remind yourself to eat and take naps because working for too long while exhausted will definitely impair your decision making and will lead to mistakes that you wouldn’t do if you were fully alert. There used to be a law that set a maximum amount of hours that a resident can work per day or week. Recently, however; this changed and residents now work even longer hours to decrease turnover. Turnover takes one or two hours anyway because it takes time for the residents finishing their shifts to fill in the residents coming in on the status of patients. They’ve also noticed that patient care is improved when there are fewer turnovers because a resident familiar with the status of a patient will do a better job treating them. So if you were counting on rules limiting the amount of hours the hospital can make you work then you should probably find something to keep you fresh during the extended hours.

You need to take care of yourself because the last thing you want is to start developing burnout and/or depression. You already know what depression is, as for burnout it’s the feeling that your patients are using you and you stop wanting to help them. This will make you hate work and may even cause you to hurt your patients either through not being fit to treat them or because you start to antagonize them. It’s a serious issue that you can’t just neglect. If you start suffering from depression or burnout then you need to take a break or talk to someone in order to feel up to the job again. The best thing to do is to prevent these negative states of mind.

There are some things you can and should do in order to stay motivated and positive so you can perform your job with full concentration and avoid developing depression and burnout. First of all you should make friends. You’re going to have fellow residents in your specialty and of course in other specialties as well. Make friends with them because you’re all going through the same thing and it’s always nice to have people keep you company. The important thing though is to keep each other motivated. You’ll want to stay away from anyone who spreads negativity and brings you down. You should also make friends with older residents and the hospital staff in general. Be nice to people and they’ll do the same for you. If you’re friends with the staff in general then you’re creating a healthy and positive work environment. Also being friends with nurses might help you excel since during your first few months they will probably better than you at a few things and you should learn from them. Find a role model among the senior doctors preferably in your specialty. He or she will be someone you can look up to and will provide you with the inspiration and energy to keep going even when you’re exhausted. It would be great if they could mentor you too and provide you with their experience.

Finally, don’t forget to make connections throughout your residency. In fact you should probably start making connections from your medical school days. You’re going to want to work hard and outshine your colleagues so that senior doctors respect you and realize your potential. This isn’t easy to do as you’re going to have to read more than everyone else and possibly practice techniques and procedures more than everyone else which you may not have time for as your workday is already full of tasks and things to do. Making connections has several benefits. For starters you can be involved in research through your connection to a doctor and research is always great even if you’re just doing it to build your CV. Your connections can also help you land future jobs either at other hospitals or through joining a private practice. Like we said you’re going to have to stand out so that doctors trust you enough to let you join them in whatever it is they’re doing because how good or bad you are will reflect on them because they’re the ones you brought you in.

Being a new doctor is all sorts of happy and sad things mixed together. It’s exciting and fascinating, but at the same time scary and terribly exhausting. At times you’ll feel like you made a difference in someone’s life and at other times you’ll feel like all you do is fill in forms and barely see patients. Some residents quit medicine after losing their passion and pursue a career elsewhere while others suffer from depression, burnout, and even suicide. The good news is that most residents do end up making it and finish their residency. You just have to surround yourself with the right people and have the right attitude all the time. Even if you’re tired try your best to stay positive. Remind yourself of why you’re doing this every time you start losing sight of that. In a few years you’ll look back at those days with fondness thinking how hard but at the same time fun it was and you’ll be proud that you made it through them.