How do I carry the weight of decisions that affect whole populations?

Your decisions do not touch one patient at a time. They ripple across whole populations, thousands of people you will never see. As that reality starts to reach you, the weight can feel almost too large to hold. Feeling it is right. It means you understand the true size of what you do. A weight that big can freeze you if you let it become about you, about your fear of being wrong on such a scale. Turn it instead toward the work. Let it make you more careful, more honest, more willing to hear the hard facts. You are responsible for thinking clearly and deciding fairly, not for personally guaranteeing the outcome for every one of those lives. Carry it by keeping the human scale in mind even as the numbers grow. Behind the statistics are real people with real lives. Let that keep your decisions grounded and humane. The weight will not go away, and it should not. Let it steady you rather than crush you, and it will make you the kind of person these calls should belong to.