As I walk the halls of the hospital day by day, I one day came to a stop and really looked at these boards. Every board contains the name of a patient as well as the room they are in. I stood in front of this board for a long while just thinking , so many times we only see just the name, room number and condition of a patient. We neglect to see the patient as a whole we define them according to their condition. These patients are so much more than just a condition or their name, each has a story to tell. I chose this picture as it represents what we see in the clinical setting, I blurred the picture to keep the patient’s information confidential.
We as medical practitioners are so quick to refer to a patient as “the one with the femur fracture” or ” the rude one” . We define our patients according to their condition or mood. We neglect to see our patients as a whole. We are so busy during the day ,as time is limited that we do not take the time to actually empathize with our patients and try to see things from their perspective. Having empathy can be described as having the understanding of someone else’s experience , feelings as well as seeing something out of their point of view.(Wilding, 2019)
We are so quick to to label our patients according to their mood , we do not take a few minutes and place ourselves within their shoes. We do not know what they are dealing with in their personal lives or why they are reacting in that way. Maybe if we took a few minutes out of our busy day to empathize with our patients and to listen to them , we would get a better response from them. Maybe if we treated them more like a human and not just as condition they would respond better towards us.
We often see our patients as something that needs to be “fixed” or a “problem” that needs to be solved. Sometimes the patient just wants someone who can relate to their situation, someone to listen, someone to motivate or just someone to comfort them when their world is falling apart.A recent study showed that patients want empathy from their medical practitioner, but some practitioners struggle to give that, as they are scared that they might get to emotionally involved. (Halpern, 2003) I for one tend to get very attached to my patients and I often struggle to separate my work environment from my personal life. Recently I tried to not get to emotionally attached to my patients by asking them less about their personal life as well as refraining from sharing to much of my personal life with them. This really helped me the last couple of weeks!
Maybe we should slow down and take a few minutes to empathize with our patients and not label them as the “difficult one” or “the one with HIV”. They are more than just a condition or number.
Halpern, J. (2003, August 1). What is clinical empathy? Journal of General Internal Medicine, Vol. 18, pp. 670–674. https://doi.org/10.1046/j.1525-1497.2003.21017.x
Wilding, M. (2019). 7 Habits of Highly Empathetic People. Retrieved August 25, 2019, from https://www.inc.com/melody-wilding/7-habits-of-highly-empathetic-people.html
3 thoughts on “Names ,Numbers and Conditions”
This is a short, well written and straight to the point reflection indeed. It reminded me that we as therapists actually tend to forget that we are treating people and focus on the condition and getting the patient out of hospital as quickly as possible and get on with our day. I actually realised that I also do that more than I think, and when I discuss with other therapists I use such phrases like “the New CVA in room 11”
Something else that maybe you could consider adding is have you personally used names , numbers and conditions to identify more patients than you would have liked, and are there any steps you took to try and deal with that. Are there any practical steps you have taken to reduce that and have they been effective and how can we include other disciplines in those steps so that the whole MDT can treat patients more than just statistics.
The piece however is well written
Great artwork and writing! I like how you have used something as simple as a patient’s board as an artwork because it is something we all as physiotherapy students have seen but never thought of as something so deep. I also love how I can see your emotions through the writing, and how much you care about your patients
It would be really nice for you to describe more on how the artwork you have chosen is incorporated into the writing instead of the readers guessing what it represent, i.e. the blurred names may represent how we neglect the patient’s names and how we just call them by their condition. So I guess my question is, was it intentional for you to blur out the picture or was it solely due to patient confidentiality, and how do you think we can separate getting too emotionally attached to strictly doing our jobs as physio’s because I struggle so much with that?
Also you might want to check your grammar/spelling, in the first line you’ve used a small “I” instead of a capital one
Hi Nadia, thanks for sharing this piece. I really enjoyed reading it and i could relate to it alot. I have also often referred to patients according the conditions they present with. Initially, this was not a concern to me as it is convenient for communicating the essential information and reporting about patients with other health professionals. There is no justification for referring to patients according to their disease or condition, empathy and sympathy is lost in as we keep referring to patients according to their ‘problem’. I like how this piece teaches us that it is important that we respect our patients and not partake in crimes against humanity. However, regarding your art piece and reflection, I did not quite understand the link because normally in the wards boards they write patient’s name, room number and bed number, they do not write the patient’s condition. Another thing you that you can consider to add in this writing is how this affects patients, have you maybe tried to interview patients to get an understanding of how this could be affecting them.
Thanks again for sharing this piece with me. I have learnt alot from it
Thanks for sharing this post