Professional socialisation?

Tuesday's are teaching days throughout my GP Registrar year. This means time spent in a small room with all my fellow GP Registrars being taught subjects relevant to General Practice. Yesterday started with a gentle introduction into Registrar life. A summary of what to expect in the upcoming year, how to prepare for exams and to round it off, a nice session spent on our 'hopes' and 'fears' for the next year (seriously, I'm not making this up!) And to think I could have actually been providing a service by seeing and treating patients instead.

In the afternoon we had a session titled "Professional Socialisation and Working in Partnership." No matter how many times I read that, it makes no sense and the teaching was even more confusing. The teacher we have is a lovely lady, but her teaching drives me to tears. And with a topic title like that it didn't take long before the tissues came out.

The teaching session focused on how various healthcare professionals interact and how - with examples - our egos get in the way of patient care. We went through some scenarios, which actually took place, where meetings with a range of healthcare professionals would turn into slanging matches about who holds authority over whom.

Often in these examples, the GP (or doctor) was relatively unscathed, and the people in the meetings (to discuss healthcare of a variety of patients) would place the doctor at the top i.e. the one with the most responsibility and then fight it out amongst themselves to decide who ranks where. If this all sounds confusing, it is!

Bottom line, doctors almost always have to take the most responsibility - the buck stops with them. Everyone else does their respective jobs but when things go wrong, ultimately they all turn to the doctor to sort it out. Interestingly, there were no examples of when things go right and the doctor is given credit - in those cases everyone wants a share of the praise.

There was an interesting scenario towards the end which woke me up a bit. Three seperate groups of psychiatrists and psychologists were made to watch a video of an interview with an actor who was displaying absolutely normal behaviour. The first group were told that the man "although appears neurotics, is perhaps psychotic," the second group were told that the man "is absolutely normal" and the third group were not told anything.

After watching the interview, 75% of the first group diagnosed the man with a psychotic condition, only 8 said he was normal. In the second group 90% said the man was normal and in the third group there was practially a 50-50 split between being diagnosed normal or being diagnosed with a psychiatric condition. How this is professional socialisation I don't know.

The last half hour was spent discussing working in partnership with patients, but I was so out of it, I can't remember what was said. Although I did get a good quote from a doctor to a patient "there are things about you I could never know and there are things about the human body that I know but you don't, so we must work together to come up with a solution for us both." That's deep!

So after complaining about how boring yesterday was, I've managed to come up with a good amount of information and in the process bore you guys to! These blogs better get interesting soon - I'm just warming up.

Take care all,
Thoughts just flow, when do they have to make sense?