As a nurse it’s weird to be a patient yourself. So far, I’ve been lucky that I haven’t been hospitalized for anything major during my nursing career. But, as I was recently a patient in the emergency room, I was able to see things from the eyes of a patient.
I went through triage, and with my abdominal pain, I was very low priority. So, I sat in the waiting room for about 2 hours before ever being put in a gown and being seen by a physician. The doc came in and did an assessment, ordered some IV fluids, a GI cocktail, and an abdominal ultrasound. The nurse came through for the IV and the delicious elixir, and transport later came through to to take me to ultrasound. After my ultrasound, my gurney was placed in the hallway as there were no curtained beds available (my least favorite part of being a patient in the ER).
I never felt like I was being rushed through the process or that people weren’t listening to me, but I did feel like it would be easy to get lost in the shuffle. As one health care employee came to speak to me, they had no contact with the other health care workers nor did they acknowledge each other. Every person had their own job and they each did their job right on queue. As a patient though, it felt very automated; I never talked to one person for more than 60 seconds at a time and since the nurse was writing her notes on a crumpled piece of paper from her pocket and the doc walked away without writing a single thing, I didn’t really feel like everything I was telling them was being taken in.
But, now from the other side of the coin, I can understand not writing down pieces of information. I’ll often take a history from a family member without writing things down or having the computer open if they have a minimal amount of previous medical problems. I’m not an ER nurse and I never have had that experience, but I assume that they have several patients at the same time, especially in the sub-acute section of the ER (like where I was located) and aren’t able to take the time and sit and talk.
This does make me look at my practice a little differently. As I admit a patient into the ICU, I take a couple extra minutes to explain the plan and ask them if they have any questions. If I can, I will tell them that I need to call the physician to get some orders, but I expect to go for a CT scan that afternoon and have some blood drawn in the next hour. Knowing what the plan is and who might be coming to see them takes away a lot of the automation of health care and gives them a constant person (me) to talk to if they have concerns or questions.
AS a recent and very rare visitor to any hospital, I came away from my surgery experience pretty well satisfied. But the worst “not-knowing” part came during the admittance. Just a lot of sitting – requests for blood and needles and extras over and over without any real explanation though I did ask. Asked to put on gown even before I knew whether there was even a real reason I was there. Sitting in the room, not given any estimation of time of when the next doctor or nurse would show up – or why. I did have a private room, though. It took a very long time – and I had insurance.
But they fixed me, it wasn’t at all horrible, just a lot of keep me guessing.”
Being a fairly new nurse (3 years) and an ICU nurse, I have recently found myself shortening my explanations and my “sitting” time with patients and families. It is a very bad habit that I have been working on breaking.
It started when a patients’ family member asked what a certain blinking light on a vent was, so I tried to explain it as best I could in layman’s terms. Well, this member then went on to rip the ICU attending doc for “ignoring” his mother’s vent alarm (it was an occasional “low exp min vol” alarm. Long story short, the MD then laid into me for explaining things to families and that I should just tell them to sit at the bedside and hold their mom’s hand and don’t worry about the alarms. I was a bit taken aback and have since been careful what I tell them. However, I LIKE informing them and trying to let families have a sense of what is happening in this room filled with monitors, noises, pumps, fluids etc…
Even if I wasn’t in health care, if my loved one was in the hospital, I would want to know what is happening, what is going to happen and what did happen. It’s called common courtesy and should not be overlooked in health care or in life.