I have an exam in 2 hours, so of course I am sitting here in this uni bar at 11am in the morning blogging… I can’t think of a better use of my time.. Can you? Some might argue that whatever I cram in the next 2 hours is not likely to be of any good to me anyway… Ah well… I’m not too worried.. It’s one of my nursing subjects.. They seem very common sense in comparison to my midwifery subjects…
I had a conversation with a patient a few weeks ago that has been playing on my mind.. I guess I wasn’t really sure how to take it.. I’ll set the scene…
This semester part of my midwifery degree has me working at the local hospital’s maternity services 2 days a week. We work accross post-natal, birth unit, family birth centre, ante-natal clinics and detal monitoring. I love it. It’s hands-on experience and it’s what I need to learn the practical tasks of the job…
The conversation I had was a fleeting moment with a father of a newborn baby… His wife ran into some complications during the birth of their bub, and she was transferred out of family birth centre into the post-natal ward so that she could stay a bit longer and get some extra medical assistance. The father marvelled to me: “Wow! I can’t believe the level of care she’s receiving! This is in a public hospital! I’d expect this in the private sector, but not public!”
Back in June, I was lucky enough to have an article published in Sunny Days magazine, which I haven’t shared with you guys here.. But I will.. It basically went to say how much I love my course, and love what I’m doing, but that the most important aspects of my job and who I am, cannot be learnt at uni. As a nurse or a midwife, the most important attribute you can have is a genuine care, love and respect for people. The job is too bloody hard if you don’t care. Being someone like me, I care about each and every one of the patients in my care. For me, care is not just saying that a person is under my allocation for the day, it’s doing everything I can to make their stay somewhat less painful. I accept that I can’t change things, I accept that I can’t make the pain go away. And I admit that there are situations where this will be difficult to stomach.
But as far as things go, it’s not just working a shift to me. It’s not just cleaning bed pans, administering medication, checking for bleeding, monitoring vital signs, showering patients, changing beds, changing nappies, cleaning up bodily fluids, and monitoring heart rhythms. These menial tasks are all a part of the bigger picture. I wouldn’t do those things if I didn’t also care. I sympathise with my patients, I empathise with my patients, and I care about who they are as a person. To me the person is in the bed, it’s not just another number in the bed. It’s a person, who has a family, they have fears, they have joys. They are more than that broken leg, they are more than that infected body part, they are more than that respiratory infection, they are real. And the majority of the time, who are in that hospital bed is not who they are in real life. That person in that hospital bed is at their worst, and they deserve some respect. They deserve to be treated as a person.
I guess I am surprised at that man’s sentiment. I can’t see why you should receive any less CARE in a public hospital to a private one. I myself was a patient in a private hospital this year. As far as I can tell the only benefit I had from going in as a private patient was that I was able to book my operation within 10 days of the first consult with my surgeon, which meant having the operation a month or 2 earlier than I would have otherwise. For me that meant being able to continue with uni this semester instead of having to defer a year. That’s it. I had a horrible nurse overnight in the hospital, and I couldn’t wait to leave the next morning… Oh and the other privelege I had from that whole experience was being able to pay for the whole operation… (some may say was my own fault being uninsured! I’ll accept that! 
But in my experience, you can’t buy care. You can’t buy empathy. These are human emotions. And the vast majority of the time, the people in my profession have these in great quantities. At the end of the day, we are human too. So if you catch us at a bad moment having had a bad day… I’m sorry…………
There’s a definite misconception out there that the level of care will be less in public hospitals. I don’t really understand why…!
I haven’t been to hospital all that much – just for the births of my babies, and to take the kids to the emergency dept on occasion (as you do), and I have to say those in the public hospital have been just as attentive and caring as in the private hospital…if not more so.
I think it comes down to each individual. In all places – private, public – there are empathetic and not so empathetic people.
You’re one of the good ones, Em.
Great post. Good luck with the exam!
while i agree with you, in theory, unfortunately we not only live in a world where you /can/ buy care, but one in which you are expected to.
i’ve only had one experience with public hospitals, after a car crash. they were very nice, but missed most of the damage, and just sent me home with a destroyed shoulder. polite, and they seemed to “care,” but now i can’t get my right arm up higher than my head.
comparable level of injury, in a private hospital? i was in surgery within a couple of hours, once a nerve specialist had been called in from another clinic..
I think the perception is that public system is overburdened and understaffed and patients have to wait an eternity to get in and then get turfed out at the earliest moment while the private system has more staff, less patients and are better equipped.
In reality, there’s a higher nurse to patient ratio in public and the level of care is generally excellent. Public hospitals are where the majority of research happens and where you find your cutting edge medicines.
Private will see you sooner and let you stay longer but for anything really serious or overly complex, they send people back over to public anyway. But in either public or private I would expect the care of the nurses/social workers/OT’s to be the same: Excellent. they’re not the sort of professions one goes into for money or the status. It’s a hard slog and if you didn’t care about people you’d never go back for a second shift!!!