We don't need to be God after all

Abstract

This paper sets out to show how some of the stress and frustrations experienced by all health care professionals may arise out of our problem-orientated training and clinical practice. It suggests how we can find and use a new, positive and therefore balancing focus in our work. This new focus serves to sustain and encourage the clinician, it invests patients and families with value and the potential for personal growth through painful experiences, and it identifies rewarding opportunities seldom recognised in the crisis situation which envelops both professional and patient. Facets of an apparently negative situation are thereby found to be positive and enabling when re-examined and re-defined. Change in our focus can produce for our patients and those around them deeper changes and more long-standing benefits than we have previously noticed. Work which we have thought was concerned with illness and sometimes death can be seen to be bringing into being a new quality of life.