It is a stressful situation when, despite all your help, you fail to save the patient's life. When you have to announce the death of a close family member to an unprepared family. You also carry with you images of massacred bodies from traffic accidents, the cries of the injured," says Dr. Momčilo Bajagić from the Podgorica Emergency Department, talking about stress in the workplace.
He adds that "these are just some of the many unpleasant images and sounds that you carry with you when the working hours are over and you go home".
According to Bajagić, the entire staff of the Emergency Service is in a rush and in a hurry every day
"The slightest delay can put a patient's life in question, and sometimes it depends on just a few minutes. You have to professionally and responsibly help patients both in the first hour of work and in the twenty-fourth," says Dr. Bajagić.
"Based on the questions posed to the patient, we triage the calls and determine the sequence of home visits, where any bad assessment of the home visit can endanger someone's life," says Bajagić.
Sometimes you help a patient, he says, and you know that there are emergencies waiting for you in the corridor. It happens that the relatives who bring the patient and the patients themselves do not understand the work of the doctor, because "everyone's illness is the most difficult".
"We have a lot of situations when we carry patients who are sometimes heavier than us up stairs, narrow corridors, elevators. Patients' lives are in our hands, and quick assessments and decisions are our daily routine.
Over time, such a responsible, difficult and stressful job becomes routine for you, and the stress turns into the satisfaction of having saved someone's life. We are flesh and blood people, but also heroes 'who are just doing their job,'" says Dr. Bajagić.
Home visits especially difficult
In the field, he says, during home visits, "you are alone with the patient, you don't have the opportunity to consult with other colleagues."
Diagnostic tools, scanner, x-ray, laboratory, cannot be carried to the field due to their bulk and "the quality of diagnosis and therapy depends only on you".
"The very nature of the situation you are in, where you have to solve the case in a short time, carries a great deal of stress in it. You have to have good knowledge in all areas of medicine, because every day there is a whole range of different cases that come to us from injuries, poisoning, traffic accidents, shootings, heart attacks," says Dr. Bajagić about his work.
The entire staff of the Emergency Service, he says, is in a rush and in a hurry every day, from doctors, through medical technicians, drivers, and hygienists, because every day they see, for the common man, unpleasant situations.
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