What's in a name?

Editor – We thank Graham et al for their recent article.¹ I have been labelled a number of terms over my medical career: foreign student, international medical graduate, foreign doctor and once a brown doctor. I am from Mauritius, studied in Newcastle and have stayed on to practice medicine. Everyone involved with this has struggled with my forename and surname which is Indian in origin and by default, very early on, my appellation has been shorted to Dr Avi. Ward rounds are written under this appellation, my office sign says Dr Avi Aujayeb and recently I have had complaints addressed as such. I hate being called Dr Avi. My parents and family are proud of me being the first doctor in the family and we are proud of my name. Aujayeb means ‘dynamic’ and Avinash means ‘that cannot be destroyed’.² Over time I have given up changing people’s mindsets every 4 months or so. From experience, I know everyone knowing and addressing me as Avi makes me more approachable as people have a name that they can pronounce and this is what is acceptable now, and no one will go back to trying to call me Dr Aujayeb. As such, I would just like to point out, that some of us are forced by country specific cultural issues (I wouldn’t go as far to call them institutionalised racism) to use their first names, even if we do not want to.