Archive for September, 2009

When you are a doctor knowing your profession and the narrow specialty you practice isn’t enough. You have to learn to interact with patients and be a gentle, understanding person. This is as important as he letter after your name.

Daily communication with patients isn’t easy. Sometimes you need to break unpopular decisions to them or bring bad news. One of your goals would be patient satisfaction by all means. You need to learn to manage your risks and develop healthy doctor-patient relations where patient complaints are dealt with sufficiently and swiftly, and where trust is the foundation of all interactions.

How you say something is as important as what you say. Having peace of mind for you and your patients means managing patient expectations successfully and knowing what to expect from each situation. All of this is possible to gain through experience, you just need to try harder.

The last time we talked about medical careers and choices to make along that tough road to professionalism. We asked you to be honest with yourself when choosing the specialty of medicine for you. We talked about how you can self-examine your character and disposition to see what type of doctor you will become best. Today let’s turn to resources and available career advice that can help you move forward without making unfortunate errors.

The easiest thing to do nowadays of course is to go on the web and run a few professional tests. They can be found as student sources and are called medical specialty aptitude tests. These tests won’t come up with a single perfect result but they will rank a number of specialties according to your abilities. There are also articles and books that you can either download online or purchase at a good bookshop near you. When you have only limited choices to make (between two and three) it’s a good idea to read literature with straight-to-the-truth rundowns of different specialties – you may learn stuff you never heard of before. Of course there is practice and your internships so do ask many questions and keep observing.

You may also want to turn to a career advisor or your supervisor with whom you have worked for a period of time. If you make the right choice from the start it will make your career so much happier in the long run.