I don’t know about you but every time that I need to go to the local doctor or hospital, I am simply in awe of the people who treat me. Doctors are an incredible breed, they are some of the most intelligent people on the planet and almost daily they are working incredibly hard to save or help to improve the lives of others in this noblest position. My friend Lisa Marie Cannon is a specialist in bowel conditions and we were chatting the other day about what it is that makes a great doctor and if this is a career which you would like to head into then here are some of the results of our conversation.

Bedside Manner

It is not only a doctor’s ability to cure and care for you during your time of need, a great doctor will do this whilst making you feel very comfortable and well-informed. There are some outstanding doctors out in the World who simply do not have people skills, they are experts and highlighting illness and treating it but they simply lack the social skills. The best doctors are the ones who can deduce and diagnose like the best of them and have the ability to talk to you on a human level.

Studious

Becoming a doctor takes years and years of studying and requires a high level of intelligence before you can become fully licensed to practice medicine. Despite this being arduous, the hard work really starts when you start to work in the field. The world of medicine is ever-changing and you will need to stay up to date with what is happening at all times, you cannot be best placed to make diagnosis and prognosis’ if you are not fully aware of all the facts.

Confident

Even if you having the greatest medical gifts in the World, if you do not have the confidence to have strength in your convictions then you will never become a great doctor. As a doctor, you need to have plenty of confidence in your knowledge and your ability to find and cure problems. Much of this will come over time as you make more and more accurate assessments but from the get-go, you should feel confident in the level of knowledge that you have. Mistakes can and will happen, what is important is that you have the confidence to understand why the mistake was made and move on from it.

Attention to Detail

The very best doctors consistently question why, why there are certain symptoms, why a patient may not be responding to treatment, why a test is showing differently to the way you thought and so on. It is in this persistent questioning that doctors will find the answers to their patient’s problems and be able to give the best possible diagnosis and treatment. A great doctor must be consistently searching in the detail of each and every case and seeking to find the answer to the questions that they are presented with.