Protect the Medics was created to ensure that people who work in the medical profession always have somewhere they can turn to relieve the stresses of work. Whether it’s providing them free access to our mental health services, or offering a place where they can have a chat with other people who work in the same field and will understand what they experience, we are here to offer them that outlet.
Our Core Values
In order to ensure that we always speak with one voice across our charity, we have created some core values that we will all follow:
- Passion.
We are passionate about the wellbeing of our medics and are dedicated to always being the best we can be.
- Respect.
Even in the face of adversity, we treat each other with kindness and respect. Our charity is a family and we must always look out for each other.
- Equality.
We understand that the greatest ideas and innovations come from people from all backgrounds, cultures and abilities, so we are dedicated to embracing everybody’s differences.
- Perseverance.
We value pushing forward, even when we face times of difficulty and uncertainty.
- Teamwork.
We understand the importance of knowing our strengths, as well as the strengths of our team members. We know that sometimes it takes stepping back and letting a team member take the lead, in order to propel the entire team forward.
Our History
Whilst reading the book This Is Going To Hurt by Adam Kay, our founder read the following paragraphs:
”It’s a system that barely has enough slack to allow for sick leave, let alone something as intangible as recovering from an awful day. And, in trust, doctor’s can’t acknowledge how devastating these moments really are. If you’re going to survive working in this profession, you have to convince yourself that these horrors are just part of your job. You can’t pay attention to the man behind the curtain – your own sanity relies on it.”
”The other recurrent theme, doctor after doctor, is how everyone remembers the sad stuff, the bad stuff, so vividly. Your brain presses record in HD. They can tell you the number of the room it happened in, on a labour ward they last saw a decade ago. The shoes the patient’s husband was wearing, the song playing on the radio. Senior consultants’ voices shake when they talk about their disasters – six-foot-tall former prop forwards on the verge of tears.”
Our founder realised that that’s the truth about being a medical professional. If you ask somebody in the medical profession what their best-ever case is, they’ll pause for a few moments and think across the many successes on which one they would deem the best.
On the other hand, however, if you were to ask them their biggest mistakes, the ones that possibly cost lives, they wouldn’t even need to think about it, it would be there, right at the forefront of their memory, haunting them. People think that medics are superheroes who just walk around saving people, but they aren’t. They’re human, and sometimes bad things happen, whether it be their fault or not, and there’s never that outlet there to discuss it.
That’s exactly when Protect the Medics came to life. Although only a wild idea in a young woman’s mind at the time, our founder realised that this whole situation of bottling up the bad stuff and carrying around the memory and guilt for the rest of their lives isn’t okay. We, as a society, have to stop pretending that everything’s okay and putting on a brave face hoping things will get better. We need to be able to talk about it and understand that these things happen and that you’re not alone. We MUST protect the people who give everything they have to protect us. We are nothing without our NHS, and without our frontline medical professionals. They carry our country on their backs and deserve to be looked after, the way they look after us.
A special thank you to Adam Kay, without whom this charity would never have come to existence.
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