Compassion can often be thought to refer to compassion towards patients and colleagues. However, an underappreciated aspect of this is compassion to yourself as a doctor. After producing a podcast on the importance of doctors looking after their own mental and physical health* I realised how common it was in the medical profession that despite doctors offering advice and help to others during the day – they often wouldn’t apply the same advice that they gave to themselves.

I decided to make a short film called ‘Pressure.’ to this interrogate this tendency in an abstract but confrontational way. The film is split into two parts.

The first displays a doctor taking part in a standard consultation with a patient, but it is slightly blurry, showing how a doctor can sometimes feel like they step out of their own person and into the doctor role. Doctors may feel they are running on a sort of autopilot. There is a change in tone when the next patient who enters the consultation room is the mirror of the doctor himself, someone that he is unwilling to face or treat. Despite the doctors’ best efforts, he cannot separate his professional self from his personal self – they are one and the same and influence one another.

The second part of the film displays the multifaceted nature of doctors and drives home the point that the personal and professional self cannot be separated as we see students discussing a CBL case but also laughing and joking. It is often easy to forget that doctors are people and are not simply their medical roles.
The diversity of the group shows how the doctor in the first part of the film could be any member of the medical profession, and that compassion towards yourself is key for everyone.

*Podcast: https://www.medicine360.co.uk/podcast/episode/928146fa/what-happens-when-doctors-get-sick