Shared vulnerability: The patient perspective on doctors’ wellbeing

People with chronic health conditions are the top consumers of the NHS. I am part of this world, one of the thousands of long-term sufferers who populate wards and waiting rooms, unable to recover but desperate to be patched up and kept alive.

With large chunks of our lives spent either in hospital or talking to our GPs, people like me become seasoned observers of doctors.

If you are time-served, you have a unique perspective. We sense trends. We are as much at the sharp end as our doctors. We see the increasing pressure upon them, if only in the strain on their faces. We suffer the increasing scarcity of time and resources, experiencing the resulting drop in personal attention.

As doctors burn out trying to maintain standards so we the patients grow dull-eyed and weary, angry and sore. Neither party has much agency or choice. We simply stagger on.

Ever since my horse-riding accident in 2010, when I broke my neck at cervical 6/7, I have become something of a semi-professional observer of healthcare. Over 15 years, I have accumulated more than 15 months as an in-patient. I have spent dozens of hours more as an out-patient.

My list is no more grim or lengthy than many other people’s. I’ve had multiple operations (one to save my life), emergency hip surgery, a colostomy and two complicated hernia repairs. Most recently was a mastectomy (to save my life again). Then there have been the numerous in-patient and out-patient procedures to combat the effects of paralysis – the bladder, bowels, worn-out shoulders, spasms, damaged skin.

I get to see fewer consultants now; the advanced nurse practitioners do much more. I’ve seen two of my most exceptionally humane and clever consultants retire in their fifties, determined to protect themselves, keen to do less stressful things.

When elective surgery to repair my rotator cuff was cancelled for the second time, I wrote politely to the surgeon to say I no longer wanted the operation. I could not face organising and then cancelling all my extra care arrangements again. He sent me a frank, deeply apologetic letter; he’d forgotten my special circumstances and the cancellations were out of his hands.

I have winced when I’ve heard fellow spinal patients and their relatives, dissatisfied with their care, verbally attacking doctors. It is unfair but the medics can only absorb it, a sponge for anger and distress.

Read more: Access, abuse and the hidden cost of throughput

One of my spells in hospital, on a general intake ward, imprinted me with a painfully perfect cameo of the mutual distress of both patient and overworked doctor.

In the early hours, a frail elderly lady was admitted from A&E. It was impossible not to overhear the drama, although pity told you to try. Within the cocoon of false intimacy that thin curtains and dimmed lights create, the woman sobbed her story to the registrar.

She cared for her even older husband, and that evening she had collapsed with the strain, her bowels giving way, her body in total meltdown. The nurses had showered her and she had been admitted for assessment. But she was desperate, pleading with them to let her go home. Her husband would be helpless without her, she said.

Ten minutes later, a trainee doctor was sent to take blood. Plainly, from his voice, he was nervous, his skills not yet established. He could not find a vein. I tried to block my ears, but there followed what sounded in the dark like mutual torture: he kept trying veins in different places, apologising, almost tearful at his failings. She in turn was wailing in distress, pleading with him to stop, begging to go home. Then his bleeper started, and he got even more harassed. I have to go, he told her, but I must get some blood. Let me try just once more. Please. I have to.

In the darkness I reflected that similar dramas occur every day in hospital. One set of people, the professionals, made vulnerable by overwork and lack of support, encountering another equally vulnerable set, the sick and suffering, in a constant stream of both acute and chronic harrowing situations.

It is no way for good relationships to flourish. A21^st health system deserves to be designed better than this.

In 2025, Melanie Reid was a member of MDDUS' expert group on doctors' wellbeing, bringing a patient's perspective to the discussions.

Read more: In the same storm, not in the same boat.

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