A view from the coffee room…When you are feeling down and you are an introvert, and someone asks you for your mini autobiography (and other benefits)

I maintain a shortlist of stupid or dare I say idiotic statements given by hospitals top administration to the newspapers. A decade ago, we were in a similar situation as today: a lack of nurses. The solution to this shortage was to bring in nurses from other countries. So far this sounds great, but there is more to this. In the newspapers I learned that the nurses were to be placed in the OR. Again fine, we need to do operations and operate more. The next sentence blew my mind: these nurses were placed in the OR since they did not have to learn Finnish, because no one talks in the OR.

So, basically everyone in the OR, surgeons, anesthetists, nurses and orderlies, work in total silence; maybe listen to radio, but no talking. We don't say a word. Maybe we communicate with hand gestures or perform pantomime. To me, this shows that the hospital administration does not understand what kind of work is done in the OR and especially how the work is actually done. Communication is of the utmost importance in the OR. One of the first things I learned in OR about communication, was that anyone can and should speak out if they notice shortcomings in sterility. This is really, really important.

LARP, live action role play, is immersive role-playing where participants physically and mentally/emotionally portray their characters, interact in real-world settings, and shape the story through improvisation. There are not many chances for surgeons to LARP during professional hours. Well, other than occasionally LARP internist, when someone asks about medicines.

Medical research and writing have changed after introduction to LLMs, large language models, such as ChatGPT (OpenAI, San Francisco, CA, USA) launched Nov 30, 2022.  LLMs employ neural network and have been trained to understand and generate human language and  produce human-like responses1.

Residency, and especially surgical residency is hard1. Burnout, depression, harassment, emotional exhaustion, and stress are way too familiar with current surgery residents2-7. Unfortunately, the situation has not changed much since I was resident8, 9. But what has changed is that we acknowledge this now. I have to say though, it is good that I did not read these articles before I started my surgical career about 27 years ago.

Surgery residency and residency in general changes previous personal relationships and this is tied to evolving professional identity10. Strange working hours, and patient-doctor relationship confidentiality may lead to fewer talking points with non-medical friends and family11. Further, these relationships with non-medical friends and family may not thus provide the support they used to,11, 12 especially when dealing with work-life and residency.