Have you ever gone to the hospital and felt like you were just a number?
That the receptionist, doctor, nurse, medical assistant just wanted to get through the day and you were an impediment for them being able to finish their day and go on home?
This is not just a feeling that you get from the doctor’s office, the hospital, the emergency room, or the morgue. This has been brewing for a while now, since way before the pandemic. People feel as if they are infringing on the time of the other people who are supposed to be helping them.
This is not right.
Not in the doctor’s office. Not in the hospital. Not in the emergency room. Not in the morgue. People coming for help is the entire reason for those places and for the workers. No patients, no work. No work, no need for employees to staff those places.
No work.
No paycheck.
To reach out for help in these places, a person who will become a patient has to give out a lot.
They have to give up their control.
They have to acknowledge that they need help. This may be a big step. This is a big step for a lot of people.
They have given up so many things. The least we can do as healthcare workers is to strive to meet their needs.
After all, a nursing diagnosis is about meeting the needs of the patients. The patients coming to the hospital have more needs that can be reached.
One of the bigger needs is to not be seen as a burden, a speed bump on the nurse’s way home.
As the evening charge nurse who also took the majority of all the night call, there was no end to my shift. There was an end to my night, when I could go home, but no distinct someone is going to relieve me end to my night.
As the night call nurse there is no end to my shift. My entire responsibility and reason I am at the hospital is to care for the patient. It is the least I can do to be thorough and pleasant.
And never, ever make them feel like they are a number,
As a healthcare consumer I don’t like when I am made to feel like a number. I do not let my patients feel like they are an impediment to my night. Because I am certain they woke up in the morning and said to themselves “I’ve been a bit bored, I think I will try (insert thing that brought them to the hospital to seek care).”
Patients waiting for surgery are vulnerable and may strike out verbally for delays. We must never let them think they are taking up time they do not deserve.
Patients and families are the reason we have jobs, after all.
Dispatches from the Evening Shift 