This question was originally posted on Quora.com and was answered by Thomas Jackson. Probably the biggest thing that people don’t really understand about the job of a doctor, particularly in the hospital system, is the following, once described to me by one of my seniors: Basically, if you’re the doctor, most of your job will be like this: anyone’s problem in the hospital, becomes your problem by default, because you’re the doctor. Likewise, the words “the doctor said to do this” or “I asked the doctor” seemed to serve as this all-powerful abrogator of responsibility to most other departments…who knew this and used it. For example, I remember being a first-year intern, getting paged for everything possible under the sun. These are all real-life situations I was asked to respond to on a regular basis. “The patient is about to go into cardiac arrest” “This patient you’ve never met with this disease you have never heard of is complaining of this unexpected symptom, what do we do about it” “The patient and/or their family is upset about this issue you have no control over” (bonus points if they want to “speak to a doctor” when it’s a non-medical issue). “I don’t like the current staffing arrangements in the hospital, doctor” (I’m sure you don’t…now what do you want me to do about that?) Obviously, some of these were your job to deal with, some less so, but it was probably the single most defining aspect of what we did. The only other thing that really came close was the insane amount of time spent doing paperwork and administrative tasks rather than medical work. Now sure, if a patient of mine was deteriorating, or I was covering a ward with complex patients, then obviously, medical queries were really what I was there to deal with, painful though they might have been at times. I used to get somewhat more annoyed if it was for bureaucratic reasons or other nonsense. For instance, if a nurse paged me to say “I don’t want to give this medication because the patient has a documented allergy”, that was obviously a very valid reason not to proceed until I’d clarified the matter. On the other hand, when it was things like “we can’t give this essential medication because some policy that was written in 1984 (not an exaggeration) says we need to take this unnecessary precaution which we can’t do”, it was somewhat less satisfactory. Likewise, there was a tendency for some (not all) but some other departments or staff members to contact you for matters that weren’t within your expertise, and would then expect an answer, mostly because again, if a doctor said to do this or that, there was a perception that this abrogated responsibility to them. For instance, I remember getting paged to answer questions about a patient’s mobility status and what support equipment they should be using (something I had precisely zero training on)- this is a matter that required a physiotherapists’ advice: “we know, but it’s now 7 pm and the physiotherapist has gone home, so what do we do, doctor?” Source
