Throughout your medical career, the best relationship you have should not be with your textbooks. Along with a love for medicine, the best physicians have an innate love for people. Learn how building relationships with your mentors, patients, and loved ones can benefit your medical career, and how neglecting these relationships can shortchange you and others. Building relationships with your mentors In such a high-stress, multi-disciplinary profession, the importance of good mentors throughout your medical career cannot be underestimated. On a practical level, it’s important to have someone you trust to ask for help and guidance on the job. Just as important, these people can also provide you some much-needed emotional support and encouragement to not only survive the day-to-day pressures, but to reach your full potential. In following their example, you not only learn how to be a better physician, but also a mentor for someone else. Having mentors in your field is so important that not having them could deter students from pursuing medicine altogether. Recognizing the need for mentors in underserved communities, Dr. Lynne Holden co-founded a nonprofit called Mentoring in Medicine, which offers mentorship to minority students dreaming of medical careers. As one African American student who aspires to be a physician says, “You can’t be what you can’t see.” Building relationships with your patients There is no question that the doctor-patient relationship is key to satisfaction on both sides of medicine. With crowd-sourced online review sites like Yelp, patients are now more vocal than ever when it comes to how they feel about their doctors. Though we place a lot of emphasis on skill and competency when it comes to these reviews, patient satisfaction actually has more to do with the relationship skills their doctor demonstrates. Thus, physicians need to go beyond the standard bedside manners and master the art of the doctor-patient relationship, from before the appointment starts to long after. Unfortunately, with the onset of technology and Electronic Health Records, doctors spend much more time in front of a computer screen than with their patients. A recent Swiss study showed, “for every hour the residents spent with patients, they spent an average of 5 hours on other tasks.” Recognizing this issue, health professionals are attempting to reform the medical process, from more residents per patient to voice recognition devices. After all, technology is meant to facilitate the doctor-patient relationship, not replace it. Building relationships with your loved ones Probably the most shortchanged relationships in medicine are those outside medicine—more specifically, family, friends, and significant others. However, the health of those relationships can affect your well-being and performance in school and on the job. The most important way to maintain these relationships is through open communication. Let your friends and family know when you need to rest and study and for how long. Setting clear boundaries will help you avoid resentment from both ends, resulting in more quality time even if quantity suffers. Dating in medical school can present a unique challenge, whether your partner is also in medicine or not. Either way, you must resist the temptation to take each other for granted and see any free time you have as study time. Instead, you must prioritize uninterrupted time together at least once or twice per week, even if it’s via Skype. Start to view your relationship as not a distraction but as an investment in your emotional well-being so that you can be more balanced and productive when focused on school. Source
