The good that goes unseen
I have a couple of hours free this morning and not wishing to start researching and writing anything more technical, I thought I'd briefly write up some of my observations about how hospital work has gone so far.
I'm currently at the end of a month on my course, and two weeks into a three week placement on Renal Medicine. Being in a new environment always unleashes an awful lot of thoughts and ideas - the new people in a particular place (and in particular, the new people with time on their hands) tend to notice things that the regulars often skip over. As a medical student with few responsibilities, I have had time to watch the patients on the ward day by day, and I guess I have learnt quite a lot about how people respond to becoming patients in hospital. I've learnt many important lessons, but among the most important has been the slow realization that a diagnosis of chronic illness affects people in subtle ways. It changes peoples' reactions to things, their outlook on life, their relations with peers and with people they don't know. In my (limited experience), it can cause people to value what they have more than they did before. It can cause them to sustain better relationships with their loved ones than they did before. These are all changes which I naievely did not expect would come out of a turn of events which on the surface seems negative.
But I digress! this post was intended to be about something else I've noticed on the wards - namely, the amount of good that goes on daily and (seemingly) unrecognized. Hospitals tend to epitomize this because the atmosphere is often too busy and intense to give people the gratitude they are 'due', and also because they are places in which it is particularly easy to perform many acts of charity on a daily basis. No-one has the time to stop and look at interactions on a hospital ward, and observe the good deeds which are done silently and the effect they have on people, but if they did I'm sure their ideas about what makes a patients' stay in hospital as pleasant as possible might change a little. Perhaps that's part of the point of being a medical student - possessing enough 'free' time to see these little subtleties of the wards. They're fine points, but they make all the difference to the ward environment, and by induction large numbers of small tweaks add up to a makeover.
I'm currently at the end of a month on my course, and two weeks into a three week placement on Renal Medicine. Being in a new environment always unleashes an awful lot of thoughts and ideas - the new people in a particular place (and in particular, the new people with time on their hands) tend to notice things that the regulars often skip over. As a medical student with few responsibilities, I have had time to watch the patients on the ward day by day, and I guess I have learnt quite a lot about how people respond to becoming patients in hospital. I've learnt many important lessons, but among the most important has been the slow realization that a diagnosis of chronic illness affects people in subtle ways. It changes peoples' reactions to things, their outlook on life, their relations with peers and with people they don't know. In my (limited experience), it can cause people to value what they have more than they did before. It can cause them to sustain better relationships with their loved ones than they did before. These are all changes which I naievely did not expect would come out of a turn of events which on the surface seems negative.
But I digress! this post was intended to be about something else I've noticed on the wards - namely, the amount of good that goes on daily and (seemingly) unrecognized. Hospitals tend to epitomize this because the atmosphere is often too busy and intense to give people the gratitude they are 'due', and also because they are places in which it is particularly easy to perform many acts of charity on a daily basis. No-one has the time to stop and look at interactions on a hospital ward, and observe the good deeds which are done silently and the effect they have on people, but if they did I'm sure their ideas about what makes a patients' stay in hospital as pleasant as possible might change a little. Perhaps that's part of the point of being a medical student - possessing enough 'free' time to see these little subtleties of the wards. They're fine points, but they make all the difference to the ward environment, and by induction large numbers of small tweaks add up to a makeover.
Comments
Post a Comment