How work can be made less frustrating and conversation less boring

doi:10.1136/bmj.319.7225.1633

From trainee to consultant, BMJ Group offers doctors around the world tailored information, special events, learning resources and recruitment services at every step along their career path.

... by doctors, for doctors, for patients
We are open for entries!

Online learning

BMJ Learning

High-quality CME / CPD for doctors and other healthcare professionals. BMJ Learning features hundreds of accredited, peer-reviewed learning modules in text, video, and audio formats. Find out more

Courses and Qualifications

BMJ Masterclasses

BMJ Masterclasses, led by experts, help clinicians to use the latest evidence and recent guidelines in practice and meet their CPD/CME requirements. Find out more

Exam Preparation

The leading provider of online exam preparation, helping over 167,000 healthcare professionals to pass their exams. Find out more

onExamination

Search all BMJ education articles:

From

Limit by

Access to the full text of this article requires a subscription or payment. Please log in or subscribe below.

Theodore Zeldin, fellow (theodore.zeldin@sant.ox.ac.uk)

St Antony's College, Oxford OX2 6JF

Editorial by Clever

The frustrations of relationships and of work are at the root of much illness in today's society. Technology cannot do much more to relieve them; it cannot tell people who to love, what to think, where to go, or what to do for a living. So medicine, which remedies the suffering which results from such decisions, needs additional partners to modify behaviour harmful to health. To find these partners it must reconsider its assumptions about how people come to change their behaviour, both in private and at work.

Summary points

Work can be reorganised to prevent it being demoralising, blunting sympathies, and narrowing horizons

Jobs do not need to turn people into part time slaves

Barriers between professions can be breached to provide more varied stimulation

New methods of conversation can produce radical changes in people's sense of their own capabilities

Doctors are well placed to show how work and enhancement of personal life can be reconciled

Methods

This article is based on two books I have written, one of which contains long bibliographies. 1 2 It also reflects the first findings of my ongoing project on the future of work, supported by the European Commission, which involves studying a wide range of occupations from the point of view of how their frustrations could be diminished.

How do people change their ways?

We have long been taught that important changes are brought about by the discoveries of geniuses, by mass revolutions, or by the influence of exceptional leaders. On the other hand, we are also told that we live as we do because deep economic forces, historical traditions, or the traumas of our infancy—none of which we can easily avoid—make change difficult. There is some truth in both opinions. But they miss a more decisive factor.

The central impulse in the history of humanity has been …