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Motivation & Insight into Medicine 10


What do you think are the main stresses that you will encounter as a doctor?
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Average Candidate Response
  • The main stress that I anticipate is working long, often anti-social hours and balancing this with my non-work and family commitments.
  • I also think that seeing patients pass away will be a challenge, especially at first.
 
Excellent Candidate Response
  • I understand that medicine can be a very demanding career, both physically and emotionally. Not only are you often working very long hours, but you can be continuously under public scrutiny. There is a lot of pressure on each decision you have to make, such as whether to proceed with treatments and for patients these can be life changing.
  • The aspect which I would likely find most stressful is having to break bad news to a patient, not necessarily by having to explain a diagnosis, but more recently having to tell a patient that although a potentially lifesaving treatment is available, it is not licensed upon the NHS under NICE guidelines. This is increasingly common due to the limited resources faced by the NHS, such as in the case of the Drug, Provenge which has been shown to be an effective treatment of Prostate Cancer, but can only be accessed privately due to the high costs of this medication.