Posts Tagged ‘doctor’
White
Posted on: November 11, 2020
Why do white become the typical color for uniform of healthcare professionals? We have doctors in most countries wear white blouse, nurses wear white dress, donning white nurse caps, pharmacists wearing white coat and so on. It has been a tradition for many decades. However, the white color might have a deeper meaning, the meaning of being a blank paper and being nonjudgmental.
During my career and practice as a pharmacist, I have had ups and downs with my jobs. Similar to other healthcare professional job, I have to deal with nice patient as well as grumpy one on a daily basis. I hated it. Hated – past tense! After working for 4 years in clinical settings, meaning hospital and aged care and away from the bombarding community, I have realized many important things. Firstly, choosing to work in healthcare is to choose the hard path for your career. You could have been someone who works 9-5 and enjoy your evening as well as the weekends. You could have turned off your computer at the end of work and not thinking about it until the next morning. For me, I could not. One you dispense a box of medication or make a decision about someone else’s health, it haunts you. Did I put the right name? How about the instruction on the box? Was it the right strength? Oh, but the scanner came up green tick so it should be correct! Oh wait but I was busy at that moment, did I even type in the right strength, because that would mask the scanner checking process! Did I make the right decision to not supply all the tablets and wait for the doctor to call back? Will he call back tomorrow? Did I make the patient wait on a trivial thing that could be ignored? She looks so sick though! It is a tornado of thoughts that you just cannot escape. Choosing healthcare, means you have decided to dedicate your life to other people, make them happy and hopefully healthier.
Then comes the human judgmental habit. We are quick to judge someone. It’s our nature and there is no way we can avoid it. We can only limit it towards certain people. First priority: our patients! We could have had a bad day, but so is the patient just walked into the pharmacy. We have chosen this path so we really should not ask anyone to understand us. I am here wearing this white coat, changing my social role into a healthcare professional, to care for others! It is not about me, it is about the others! In hospital, this is amplified several times. Patients are usually bed-ridden or really sick to have to be in hospital. They might have been abused at home by family members, who they love the most. I have seen cases of elderly parents being admitted because they were abused at home by their loved ones, their children, whom they should be able to trust the most. And I have seen in many cases, they said they still love their children regardless. Suddenly, you are not dealing with a patient anymore, but a human! Full of normal emotion and normal daily problems, who is as vulnerable as yourself. The patients might be absurd to us, they might be rude, well because they cannot get it out at home. Hence, even if we have a bad day, we leave it at the hospital door and walk in with an open mind, just like our white coats.
What about our mental health? There are cases of healthcare professional committed suicide because of stress, or get into major depression due to workload. We are literally being split into two or three different personalities: one for work, one for our family and friends, and one for ourselves to keep. We can only 1/3 be ourselves, when we are alone! The rest, we have to be nice! I have seen many who have become blunt and abrupt after working for so many years in healthcare. Therefore, it is important for us to look after even our colleagues at work because after all, the purpose of our life and career is to care for others, regardless of patients or a colleague.
So why do we wear white? Doctors, nurses, pharmacists and many others. Our white symbolise purity and do no harm. However, the most important thing is it also symbolise us as nonjudgmental people, at least not while we are at work. It is a blank page, to take in patient’s problems, in the most genuine way, and to somehow help them to get better. I have soften down a lot after all these years working in healthcare. I have admired some of my previous colleagues who always can smile even after they are blasted with insults and angry complaints by customers. They have achieved a nonjudgmental state of mind, of not letting it into you, of letting go and of being flexible in emotion. The state that I am, still, working towards in this long journal of caring for people.
Maia’12 – Minidad wannabe
Posted on: May 31, 2012
Hi again and here is my update blog for May 2012. In this blog I will talk about my placement in Geelong at Geelong Hospital and how it has changed my mind totally.
The song for this blog is Dareka no tame ni (誰かのために – What can I do for someone?). This song is very famous if you know AKB48, this is the charity song that AKB48 sung for all the people of the tsunami disaster in Japan. I highly recommend you listen and enjoy this song as well as reading the lyric because it is truly a great song with a touching lyric – one of the best AKB song of all time. Enjoy:
http://soundcloud.com/ngub/dareka-no-tame-ni-what-can-i
The lyric and translation of the song can be found here:
http://stage48.net/studio48/darekanotameni.html
I was placed at the Geelong hospital, which I considered being my bad luck because it is my third placement far away from home. The first placement, I got Northern Hospital, which I have to drive more than an hour each morning to get to. My second one is rural placement, so I have to go to Ballarat and stay there for 3 weeks. It is about 2.5 hours drive from Melbourne. Then I got Geelong for my third one, which is not fun at all! At first, I did try to get out of the place but unsuccessfully. However, after finishing this placement, my mind totally changed and I think it is Life’s miracle to get me there.
A friend and me were assigned to be in Paediatric ward for 3 weeks of the placement. I was never good to with children and I never know why. My dad is a paediatrician and I should have inherited his skills. During the 3 weeks there, I learned a lot of things and it was the best placement ever! With children, especially in the health care system, we need to be extremely careful in dosing them drugs so on the drug chart, even everyday-drug like Paracetamol, the dose was checked very carefully by pharmacists.
Every morning we started at 9am and we followed all the residents, doctors and registrars on the ward round. They would go to room by room, give us an overview of the conditions of the patients and their cases, then we would go in, observing the patients and how the doctors examined them. It was absolutely fascinating to watch all these processes being carried out in front of your eyes rather than just reading history notes. Every Monday and Friday we would have a case meeting with all of the members of the health-care team on board, so they can stay together and discussing the treatment. All health care students had a chance to attend these meetings. I personally think this is really cool and extremely effective to communicate between all the health professionals.
Regardless of all the things happening during the placement, something special had happened inside me… Suddenly I want to be a doctor so bad! Everyday during the ward round, there was this paeditrician that really reminding me of my Dad. There were also a female resident that reminds me of my sister. I don’t know why but right at that moment, I miss my family so much. I miss the time when we used to stay together and my sister used to sit next to my Mom and helped her with putting the medications inside those small paper bags and write something like “1 tablet in the morning and 1 at night for 3 days” on the packages, while my Dad was treating the patient in the next room. It was a home clinic of Love I would say.
When I see those doctors carefully examine all the sick babies in the room, I suddenly want to cry. Then I had a chance to walk with my pharmacist to Special Care Nursery Unit, where all the pre-term babies are raised inside the isolation cages. I walked around the small room, which is called a ward itself. Until you have the chance to see this by your own eyes, you wouldn’t believe how small you were when you were born. It was heartbreaking to see all these tiny tiny tiny babies lying in those cages, breathing softly with their small chests going up and down. I could just hold them in one hand, that’s how tiny they are! That was the moment I said to myself that I want to study medicine in the future!
To see all the doctors rushing in a room during an emergency call of a baby having whooping cough attack at the age of 8 weeks was horrible! My pharmacists told me:
-Well, we can’t do anything. We just have to stay here so we can stay out of their way…
NO I DON’T WANT TO! I WANT TO RUSH IN AND HELP! I WANT TO DO SOMETHING FOR THOSE BABIES! BECAUSE I LOVE THEM! – I cried inside my heart. I want to be there to help them… At that moment, I know I want to become a doctor like my dad. I am a Minidad wannabe! I also want to be like my sister, hard-working and caring. When you look at them, you sort of can see the Love aurora shining from them although they look very normal. I planned to finish this course, qualify as a pharmacist, then get to stay back here and then study up to become a doctor. Whether this dream comes true or not, no one knows, but I will try my best. I want to be able to help and treat all those people with my own hands. I imagine the moment when you brought a person back from near death would feel amazing because you know you have given them a second chance to live this beautiful life.
I want to use my life to help other people… I think I have finally found what I really want to do now because it feels so right when I think about it. I never be afraid of becoming a health professional. It is like my nature when it comes to working in health care system. I never feel tired when I work at the pharmacy because just to see people smile and say thank you for your help make me feel warmer inside. I love my job so much!
… I nearly become Minimom, but now in the future I wanna be come Minidad as well… A younger version of my Mom and Dad… who are so caring and dedicated to their jobs! There are times when Mom and Dad treat people without taking their money. That is true health care in my point of view…
… Mom and Dad… I want to continue your path to spread the love and care to all the people that needs help and come to me… Please trust in me and keep believe in me… and keep supporting me…
(Completed at 9:51pm on Tuesday 3/7/12)
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