The new generation of medical professionals keeps growing and evolving, along with technology in the medical field, as well as our responsibility to form generations of qualified graduates to address the current population’s demands.
This generation goes hand in hand with virtual medicine; although a useful tool, it involves the development of fewer interpersonal skills. Perhaps in other fields outside the natural sciences, social interactions through virtual means and virtual work activity can form successful professionals, yet not in the medical field, where the doctor-patient personal relationship is still essential in order to form integral medical professionals.
Discipline and respect of hierarchies, in my opinion, has decreased from generation to generation, which leads to a loss of values such as punctuality, pulchritude, and perfectionism; thus, a deficiency in clinical skills, resulting in medical professionals unable to make a proper clinical history, a reliable physical examination, interpret information, and establish a diagnosis with logic and communication.
The so-called Burnout syndrome, which exist, and always have, is a part of our residents’ formation, who must work long shifts and learn how to manage stress and fatigue. This is not only part of their formation as a specialist but a taste of the work performed once they have graduated, keeping in mind at all times that we are working with human beings and that we are responsible for their health regardless of time, stress or personal issues, as we pronounce in the Hippocratic Oath.
Even though the internet is a tool of great value for medical attention, it by no means replaces the importance of personalized gadget-free care. Technology should be used and it is of great help in becoming experts in requesting all kinds of tests and procedures, yet technology does not always help us understand when to request them or how to interpret them. Thus we could fall into a laboratory-oriented, instead of a patient-directed, perspective.
Although values have changed, tenacious effort, pride, devotion to work, strict responsibility and the pursuit of excellence should still be the norm. University hospitals are highly prestigious institutions whose function, in addition to offering medical care of excellence, is to train high-level medical personnel. This involves a great responsibility and the requirements and demands required from post-graduate medical professionals should be higher than in other hospitals.
We, the teachers, need to recognize that our duty is to educate, supervise and explain pathophysiology, clinical symptoms and the natural history of diseases. We must be present in the learning of the residents and teach them to know which tests to order, when to do it and how to interpret them, teach them to use technology and the internet to verify rather than formulate their clinical impressions. We need them to learn the value of a good clinical history and a proper physical examination; to know how to think and be responsible, teach them that the value of hierarchy doesn’t only reside in the number of years of residence, but that every resident has surgical, caregiving and service work, teaching work to residents lower in the hierarchy and shouldering the great responsibility of demanding, reviewing and supervising each and every one of their actions performed with every one of their patients. Residents must acquire sufficient experience with responsibility, which any medical professional who graduated from our university should have.
The resident should be responsible enough to study his/ her patients and their pathologies and be able to continue offering quality care. Being a medical professional is a vocation of service to others, without major personal considerations. And we, as teachers at a University Hospital, must be responsible leaders, committed and with a high social standards.
Received: May 2014;
Accepted: June 2014
* Corresponding author:
Obstetrics and Gynecology Department,
“Dr. José Eleuterio González” University Hospital.
Francisco I. Madero and Gonzalitos Avenue,
Mitras Centro, Z.P. 64460, Monterrey, N.L., Mexico (E. M. Treviño-Salinas).