A Day As a Patient
I am here!!! Today was the first day of my first clinical and it was amazing--very exhausting--but amazing. For the first time I was able to experience the step-by-step and day-to day-activities of a physical therapist. Though working in an SNF is quite a different environment than working in a hospital, many of the patients seemed to face similar difficulties, especially with ambulation.
So far everyone is great, and the patients are amazing. With this experience I hope to carry over the Planetree philosophy which I posed a question about last week. I posted the question after attending a Planetree retreat three weeks prior. It helped me to develop a totally different perspective on health care and how we should view our patients. Often times, health care providers tend to forget that patients are people and begin to reference them in relation to their jobs/patient needs/patient diagnosis. For example, "The incontinent lady" instead of "Mrs. X." Even if you can't remember the patient's name, say "the lady who suffers from incontinence." Now everyone makes mistakes and may improperly reference a patient. It is when you forget to treat patients as humans that it becomes a problem.
The thing that sort of sparked my decision to ask/write about Planetree was after an experience I had being a patient. I just felt like "another one to go." After a 4-hour trip to attend an appointment, I was checked in, and my vitals were checked by the medical technician almost immediately. Then I sat...and waited...and waited...and waited. Finally about two hours later, a lady who had an appointment scheduled before me got up to ask what was going on. They politely answered her question (which didn't help much) and left all of the rest in the dark. For the first time I understood how patients feel when they expect to be seen by a doctor and don't know what is going on...it's quite frustrating.
After finally being called in, everything was still in disarray. First, I was left in the room by myself for 30 minutes. Then the nurse came in to take my information and, mid-sentence, another nurse came in and started a conversation with her. Next thing I know the nurse leaves again. After doing this twice, the doctor finally came in to see me and I thought that everything was fine, only the nurse forgot to come back and give me my flu vaccination. After some time passed, she came back to give me the injection, and spilled half of it out dismissing it as nothing. By this time I was ready to leave.
In total I felt as though I wasted seven hours of my time for a 15-minute meeting (literally). Now don't get me wrong, this facility has some of THE BEST doctors in the country, but they also have some of THE WORST service I have ever received. It was not only an inconvenience, but the dismissive nature of staff almost felt belittling. Though this experience isn't nearly as bad as others, all I could think after that experience was... Can we get a Planetree Retreat here STAT?!