Just got back from spending two days with my mother who was in the hospital. I was quite amazed at how poorly all the different doctors, technicians and nurses communicated with each other and with my mother, the patient. As an exercise in poor customer service, let alone medical treatment, the focus seemed to be on efficiency over compassion. Clearly you need both, but the latter was in short supply, which is really a shame since compassion and emotional comfort are as much a part of the treatment as the science and technology.
Throughout the 24 hours I spent with my mother, I couldn’t help but feel that I wasn’t in a healing institution but more like a retail establishment, where every interaction was a transaction not a conversation meant to build a relationship.
Everytime she got a medicine, an electronic bar scanner read her wrist bracelet. She didn’t say it but I imagine she felt like a can of soup being scanned at the supermarket checkout. The doctors and technicians all seemed to be reading from a script–telling you their name and what they would be doing, what would and wouldn’t hurt, much the way a waiter greets you at a restaurant or the flight attendants thank you for choosing their airline.
Then when she went for the battery of alphabet soup tests, MRI, CT, EMG etc. , it was like we were at the automechanic, where they hook your car engine up to a computer and it tells you what is wrong. Here it was all her vital organs that they were connecting with, all of them except her the one that matters most–her mind and spirit. When she couldn’t take it anymore and they finally got around to telling her that she wouldn’t need surgery, she told them she was going home. They were kind of shocked–afterall there were still more tests to run. The nurses who had been around for 20 or 30 years and remembered what medical care used to be like, understood her feelings. They were the only ones who really made an effort to talk to her as a person not a disease. Is there no such thing as empathy anymore? Are medical personnel so afraid of getting sued or saying the wrong thing that they just don’t bother? Have they forgotten the art of a kind word, a touch on the shoulder?
William Osler is turning over in his grave.
