Internship

The month June comes to an end. That means another new batch of fresh graduates from the medical school.

Utter the phrase "new interns" and the mind envisages the relentlessly action-packed life of a harried and sleep-deprived neophyte, frustrated and surrounded by murmuring patients inside a hospital where he or she knows very little.

Medical intern training is known – and often despised - as a source of stress (and it is), fatigue (that too) and endless crises that need to be resolved (guilty there as well).

We can argue all day about where to draw the line between medical on-the-job training and reasonable workload. But trust me, it is this very first year of medical internship where most of the doctors learn, in ways no medical textbooks or lectures could deliver. It has been said that medical schools do not graduate physicians; they graduate young men and women who are prepared to learn to be physicians during subsequent years of increasing responsibility and stress.

I am not trying to whitewash or defend the medical education system where budding interns get their training tethered to the extended duration shifts and long hours of sleepless work. All I am saying is that we do have to find ways to overcome the stress during the training. Level of stress and mental performance is best illustrated by an upside-down U graph or Yerkes-Dodson Law. Simply stated, stress varies with challenge; at the low end, too little breeds disinterest and boredom (as any intern with tonnes of clerical job can testify). When the challenge increases it boosts interest, motivation and sense of great pride – which at their optimal level produces maximum cognitive efficiency. As challenges continue to soar and become overwhelming, stress intensifies; at its extreme or tipping point, the interns’ performance and learning collapse.

Neat solution? Nope. Obviously, fresh graduates cannot solve all the problems. The key point, perhaps, is to acquire the ability to recognize when one needs help – before the straw breaks the camel's back.