Are You Sleeping With Your Charts?

“I take charts to bed with me,” a client recently confessed. “And sometimes I fall asleep with them.” 

I pictured him, a chart on his chest, the details of their condition as close to his heart as a lover should be. 

“I’m preparing for my surgeries the next day. My patients deserve that,” he said. 

What do patients deserve?

It could be blood on your shoes, an image you can't shake -- there are countless other ways that physicians take their patients home with them. 

Where is the line?

Does bringing work home with you actually improve patient care?

If compassion is a close second to competence in ensuring good patient outcomes, 24-7 attention to one’s patients does not ensure either.

Of course, looking over a chart in order to create a treatment plan is essential, but where must that line be drawn?

Taking work home with you is just another way to never really come home. And never getting to come home is a way to breed deep resentment for the patients who occupy your mind and heart. Everyone needs to be able to take off their work clothes and come home. This is a basic human right. How can anyone’s loss of humanity (and sleep) — even in service of another person’s health — be the right thing to do?

What do you deserve?

While the calling to practice medicine is a high one, both heroic and tragic, something is terribly out of balance if physicians believe that patients “deserve” the complete neglect doctors who neglect their own most basic needs.

What patients deserve and need is to see their doctors as role models for what taking care of oneself looks like in its highest forms.

Next time you hear yourself saying, “patients deserve that,” think about what it is they really deserve.

Patients deserve to see their physicians happy, fulfilled, well-rested and healthy. To be an unhappy, unhealthy shell in a white coat is to reduce your highest calling to being merely a dispensary of meds and an assembly-line worker for an industrial medical machine that is severely out of wack. What do you deserve? What keeps your cup full? What helps you fall asleep at night?

You deserve a personal life. Your patients deserve doctors who have personal lives. In the end, the best doctors are human beings.