Calling and Comradeship

Patient safety heavily relies on doctors performing to the best of their abilities, delivering high quality of patientcare. However, changing market forces and increasing bureaucracy challenge physicians in their performance. Despite the dynamic conditions they experience, the majority performs on a high level. What exactly drives these doctors? Answering this question will shed light on how to best support doctors to be the engaged healthcare professionals that society wants and needs them to be. So patients are ensured safe and high quality of care. This chapter dips deeper into what primarily drives doctors, thus we turned to doctors themselves for answers. Being interested in their perceptions, feelings, behaviour, relations to, and interactions with, each other, this chapter relies heavily on qualitative research involving around 1000 hospital-based physicians. Conclusively, doctors can only truly blossom in an environment that stimulates their calling and that breathes a comradeship mindset, where sharing is about caring and peer-support is felt. It’s alarming that these essential humanistic and relational values are supressed by today’s more business-like climate in healthcare. Curtailing what primarily inspires doctors will eventually lead to doctors no longer having the time, energy and motivation to deliver the best possible patientcare. To restore the balance, we provide recommendations on the individual-, group-, and organizational level.