The hidden pain of doctors who couldn't save a life

In a profession where success means lives saved, and with a culture of heroic excellence, a death can be devastating - yet this is rarely spoken about.

- Khoo See Meng

I recently chaired a virtual hospital grand round - a regular session where healthcare professionals take turns to share their knowledge, experiences and expert opinions with colleagues.

What transpired left me strangely apprehensive about ever wanting to do such a task again.

It was not that the talk was anything contentious. Quite the opposite. Someone spoke up, in a genuine and powerfully personal way about something doctors don’t often talk about: having a patient die, and how it affects us emotionally.

My colleague, with astonishing vulnerability, recounted how one night, she found herself - much like doctors do in a typical plot of a medical drama - in a crisis, having to make clinical decisions where the stakes could not be higher. But unlike a neat Netflix episode, the night did not conclude with a hero saving the day. The patient did not survive. The doctor did not live happily ever after.

She detailed her meeting with the family: “They wailed. All I could say was, ‘I’m sorry, I’m so, so sorry”.

But it was when she went deeply into the effect this profound, yet often unspoken event, had on her psychologically, that we listeners to her ordeal were stymied. I was a seasoned chairperson for healthcare-related tasks, but I was lost for a way to wrap up something as raw as this, of her baring her soul.

She said: “That night, something fundamental about my world was shaken. Medicine is never the same again. I’m never the same again. I became a recluse.”