The Corporate Community Doctor

My first blog was on Being a Community Medicine doctor. I expressed how difficult it was to explain my specialization to random aunties. It wasn't love at first sight - me choosing this branch. But accepting whatever came to me and falling in love with the subject as I explored all the nooks and crevices of this subject in detail. I found this subject as a very useful tool to provide medical services to the community at large. I said in that blog what's in a name? What is the need to call it community medicine and not Preventive and Social Medicine.

 But applying this subject and the learnings for more than two and a half years (well not that much of an experience timewise) 

I have realized that community medicine is actually a better name. 

PSM makes people focus just on the preventive aspect. But Community Medicine is just more than prevention of a disease. Prevention is an important part - YES! 

But there are a lot of things which go unnoticed by general public or even MBBS students to be more specific. Community Medicine involves evidence based management, provision of service, research work, statistics, communication, empowering people. All this starting at the grass root level going upwards to policy making. Politics is just medicine on a large scale because both involve us, humans.

Its going to be 3 months of me working on a mental health project in Jalna. It was a huge opportunity for me as a community medicine doctor to actually implement what all I had learnt from this subject.

The photo above was taken on my way to a peripheral hospital where I provide psychiatric treatment. More than work this feels like a vacation. This could be me as doctor being on #workation. I do like to be part of all the upcoming trends. When you can see that what you imagined your passion to be, is the actual work you are doing and it really makes you happy. Happy not in a way that would conventionally be accepted by the society for a 30 something unmarried cute person like me. But happy in a way to actually be satisfied at the end of the day about doing a small little significant difference out there. And out there which is out of everyone's comfort zone (not just mine). So remote that my 4G turns to GPRS in those areas.

That was the community part. But why the corporate part in the title??? I hate that part. Aaargghhhh. I used to pity my cousins working from home, attending meetings, clocking in and out. Corporate slaves! Since I started this project I have been doing that too. It was a big transition for me and a lot of effort it took to accept this part of the job. Because this part made my work feel like a job and not the vacation I was having. It might have been inconvenient for me. It did take a toll on me mentally along with the shifting from Mumbai to Aurangabad, getting adjusted, making new connections, getting used to a completely new city. Being honest with my senior helped a lot. I realized it wasn't the corporate part that was affecting me. It was my expectations from myself at doing a job perfectly that had caused me to become overwhelmed resulting in a breakdown. Addressing these aspects as they were and going easy on myself resolved most of the issues. One cannot climb the mountain in a day.

Living in Aurangabad- a city, working in Jalna and its villages, as an employee of an organization called Mpower in Mumbai; I think this is the best as it can get. The bhelpuri of cultures being enjoyed by me!