1/23 A love letter to Alberta doctors (inspired by my friend @crewecarly). You are important. You matter. The passion you have for your patients is worthy of love and appreciation. You make a difference in peoples' lives.

2/ You deserve to be valued for what you do and the sacrifices you make. And it doesn’t feel that way right now. I am going to share my thoughts and perhaps unpopular opinion here because perhaps it is a perspective my colleagues may need to hear. We are going to see a lot of…

3/ …physicians on social media, over email or in person saying "we will still show up, we will put ourselves in the line of fire for our patients, we will risk our own health and that of our families to do it, we will even go bankrupt and burn out and close our clinics,…

4/ …because that's the oath we swore" or "that's what it means to be professional" and I want to call bullshit on that right now. Yes we make a lot of sacrifices in this job and we knew when we signed up for it that it comes with the territory.

5/ But there is a line; and as a colleague I am going to say that we owe a professional obligation to not accept injury to ourselves, our families and our colleagues at the throne of our "oath" or our "professionalism".

6/ “There are no emergencies in a pandemic.” This is a phrase many of us have heard recently and as far as I can tell comes from those who worked in one of the Ebola outbreaks.

7/ They saw physician and nursing colleagues rush in to help someone, who did not survive, and then their colleagues contracted Ebola and later died themselves.

8/ One of the lessons I am trying to apply to myself and hold my colleagues to is that in a pandemic, health care workers are the most important resource.

9/ We don't rush into a dying patient's room without protecting ourselves with PPE first, even if the patient dies because we don't get there in time.

10/ We need to look out for ourselves first, so we can continue to look after our patients present and future, and this is a radical departure from everything we have been taught, but we have to do it.

11/ To do otherwise jeopardizes hundreds of thousands of other patients we will never see. We also have to support each other when our colleagues say - "no, that is too much to ask of me, and I can't do it." That includes everything from not coming to work because your health…

12/ …(physical, mental, emotional) or your other obligations have to come first, to not sacrificing yourself and your future patients just because the system has put you in a position that the work will injure you but "the system" expects you to sacrifice anyway.

13/ What I am trying to say is many Alberta doctors will swallow hard, wipe their tears of frustration, and continue to be abused by the system and say it is the honorable thing to do. Bullshit.

14/ The honorable thing to do is call out injustice when you see it, to demand that the people in charge of the system recognize the risks we are being asked to take and sacrifices we are being asked to make, and to step up and support us.

15/ “Health care workers shouldn’t have to pay for shortsighted government policies that are eviscerating health infrastructure. Social order relies on reciprocity. Imposing outsize burdens on one group without sacrifice from others is unfair.

16/ Doctors and nurses and other health care workers may be heroes in this pandemic, but we will not be martyrs.”  https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/02/opinion/coronavirus-doctors-duty.html

17/ We shouldn't walk into a COVID patient's room without PPE, and we should refuse to be shamed by anyone who tries make us sacrifice our dignity, integrity, health and safety of our families by appealing to the "honour" and "professionalism" of being a doctor.

18/ I truly believe that, and I will stand up for any of my colleagues who feel the same way. We will NOT take responsibility for something that we had no control over. https://twitter.com/medicalaxioms/status/1242429129984638982

19/ Alberta doctors are being played. You will be asked to sacrifice yourself for a system that doesn't care about you at all, for the benefit of a few patients now, but you will burn out and give up - and the tens of thousands of patients you could have helped…

20/ …over the rest of your career if you had kept yourself healthy will never get your help. There is NO honor in that. It is important that we stand up and say on behalf of Alberta docs "No, we aren't going to accept you being treated this way, and you don't have to either.

21/ And refusing to be treated this way - and refusing to let your colleagues be treated this way - is actually what makes you a highly professional physician honouring your oath."

The Hippocratic Oath is not a suicide pact. https://twitter.com/fraser_DHEM/status/1246934771948634114

22/ You are important. You matter. The passion you have for your patients is worthy of love and appreciation. You make a difference in peoples' lives. You deserve to be valued for what you do and the sacrifices you make.

23/23 And if you aren't respected, if you aren't protected, if you aren’t supported, if you aren’t valued, and if your willingness to sacrifice for others is being abused, you are allowed to say no. https://www.theatlantic.com/video/index/609475/pandemic-doctors/