2023-11-22 11:30:00
After 35 years of practicing as a family doctor and the dramatic experience of Covid, it was the telephone, with over 50 calls a day from patients combined with the high bureaucratic burdens, that made people say goodbye to the profession, 4 years early, to Ugo Gaiani, a doctor from Guastalla (Reggio Emilia) who, to ‘celebrate’ his retirement, last July had destroyed the telephone in the square with the background music of Mina’s song ‘Se telephoneing’, an act which he had then done media tour.
“It was a gesture born a bit as a joke, before a toast with friends, made for me, certainly not because it would become media coverage as it later became. But it certainly arose from exasperation at the way in which it had transformed working with patients. Today I work in a hospice, without a telephone and without bureaucracy, in a situation where the relationship with the patient is at the centre. And the care I offer has a clear response. Now I really feel like a doctor”, he explains to time.news Salute Gaiani, commenting on the investigation according to which a doctor today wastes up to 3 hours a day on the phone. “A painting that doesn’t surprise me, on the contrary”, she adds.
“My way of working has always been different – continues Gaiani – in communicating with patients I have always used the landline telephone with answering machine, the one which I then destroyed, never the mobile phone. The patients left me messages, on average 40/50 a day, I listened to them and called them one by one. With about 6 minutes of conversation for each. Three hundred minutes a day, 5 hours of phone calls and an hour for emails. And this happened 5 days a week. Fortunately, I wasn’t used to it. to use Whatsapp”. A situation which, in the long run, became highly stressful.
“We talk about burnout when a worker is subjected to a lot of stress for too long. And that too much time, as far as I’m concerned, refers above all to the post-pandemic period – says Gaiani – During the first pandemic phases, in fact, my colleagues and I received even more phone calls but it was a ‘normal’ emergency situation. We said to ourselves ‘it will pass’. This did not happen, on the contrary: patients began to find it normal to call at 8pm or even later. The emergency passed, but not the number of phone calls dropped. This was really very stressful.”
The profession in recent years, he continues, “has been much harder for me. At certain moments of the day I didn’t have time to put the receiver down before the phone rang: I spent entire days in which I heard the damned phone ringing continuously It was very difficult, even though I saw many younger colleagues managing their relationship with the telephone with much more tranquility. This is how the decision to make the ‘liberating gesture’ was born on the last day of work, when I reluctantly decided to retire early. because I was planning on going maybe at 69, but instead I went at 66 because I literally couldn’t take it anymore.”
Today, however, “I haven’t stopped being a doctor. I deal with palliative care in a hospice, but I work at my own pace, without the telephone ringing constantly”, says Gaiani, who already as a family doctor for 15 years had dealt with this type of assistance. “In our area these treatments take place at the patient’s home and in a hospice where a team of family doctors works. When I started this activity I rediscovered what being a doctor meant to me. Because in this context the professional does things that are effective in a short time and maintains relationships with patients and families that give an enormous professional and human return. I really feel more like a doctor”.
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