How to make your intern love you

As there is no profession anywhere in the world where you are studying so hard you loose touch with your family and most of your closest friends, but then still be looked upon as a pain in the ass by your peers, One would assume at least ones coach, teacher or educator would feel sympathetic towards the most awkward moment of medical teaching: The “end-of-a-rotation of 6 weeks duration conversation”.

Now, I don’t know what kind superhuman powers most medical educators posses (And god knows how many are bestowed upon me), but it seems a hard nut to crack to comeup with very specific and personalised feedback on a medical intern. Sure you have done one or two shifts with them, your colleagues may or may not have been  to busy or preoccupied to provide you with in depth feedback and of course interns suck big time anyway since in the earlier days everybody used to work so much harder.

And still, if you talk to medical students, or interns, they will all tell you that over their career they have been sitting down with the professor of such or the chief of so, the coach of specialty x and the student teacher of specialty Y. And if you ask them, what didthese conversations have in common? “All educators tried to judge not only our clinical work, but also our character”. And worse, they would invariably come up with a specification of the amount of knowledge the student may or may not have had. Of course they didn’t systematically look for character flaws – they just sensed…… They didn’t actually test knowledge with a knowledge test… they just knew.

It is about time, us clinicians and educators learn some modesty and when discussing a rotation of limited time, say anything between 2 weeks and 3 months, be consistent with the following 4 general rules.

1. The person you are speaking to is a peer. He or she has been studying for years and years and has given up so much of his or her time that it is safe to assume they have been extremely passionate about the trade of medicine. Maybe not your specific niche, but the trade yes.
2. You were pretty much of a dumb ass yourself thirty something years ago – you just forgot. It was 10 years after you finally became a consultant that you actually accumulated enough knowledge to say  you were no longer an ass. Unless you ctually tested for knowledge after telling the student what you would test for, do not make silly remarks about the amount of knowledge they supposedly have.
3. You cannot make a character judgement after a month of superficial contact. You can only tell about what an impact this person had on you personally. Stick to that. Don’t generalise. When you are using the words “you are the kind of person that…” or “People like you….” or even “You are just like me twenty years ago…”, stop doing what you are doing and put your head in a toilet.
4. Last but not least: In essence, unless you are going to remove someone from the trade for obvious malfunctioning, your goal is not to grade, to give a score or to say how somebody performed compared to others. The sole purpose of that conversation is to make that person a better doctor.  And that is it.

So I challenge you educators to abide by these rules the next time you’re having a conversation with your medical student, resident, anybody doing a short rotation on your ward or floor. Stop being an ass,  try to be a gentleman.