How I got here

We had a patient with complex medical and social needs, and we couldn't agree on a discharge plan. Everyone had a view, and we were stuck. My consultant called a professionals meeting, pulled in funding and management alongside the clinical team, heard everyone out, then put options on the table the rest of us didn't know existed. What he'd done had nothing to do with clinical knowledge and everything to do with knowing how the system worked and how to move within it.

I'd been trained for none of it.

I didn't feel the full size of that gap until I stepped up myself, during COVID. The medicine was the familiar part. It was everything around it that I wasn't ready for: the correspondence, the decisions that now stopped with me, guidance that changed week to week, and a 2am phone call that made it obvious the buck stopped here. Looking back, that was impostor syndrome, plainly. I put on a front and second-guessed nearly every call I made.

A patient complaint, oddly, was what started to loosen the grip of that impostor feeling. I'd only ever advised on this patient over the phone, and my first fear was that I'd got it wrong. Going back through the notes, the reasoning held, and my colleagues backed me. That, and falling in with a group of colleagues from across the hospital who talked cases through and were honest about the hard parts, was what finally made the role feel like mine.

An old supervisor had told me it'd click when I found my tribe. He was right.

A few years on, I watched newer consultants arrive and hit the same walls I had, each going through their own trial by fire. I helped where I could, but mostly from the sidelines.
And it got me thinking: if the people near my desk were struggling with this, what about everyone else? I didn't want how quickly a doctor finds their feet to keep coming down to who happens to be in the room.

So I built what I'd needed and couldn't find: the practical side of the job set out plainly, by people who've been there, and the sense that you're not doing it alone.

That's Keja Health. It's here so the next doctor doesn't have to work it out on their own.

Ngā mihi,

Kevin