Respect,
Empathy and Personal Responsibility
A remark
made at the nursing station while I witnessed a poor woman who had been starving for 20 hours while waiting for ECT encapsulates another problem. “Oh I
know what you’re going through,” smiled the young woman at the counter, “I’m
hungry too.“No, you do not”, was my remark. “You may be missing lunch. This
patient feels like she is starving to death” (the actual wording I do not fully
remember.) Taken as a whole, aside from the occasional rudeness, the staff was
generally polite and friendly but not compassionate. The CEO of Centennial can
rejoice that she could not have found a more loyal set of employees who (from
the very bottom to the top of the totem poll) will consistently stick to the
rules and be less inclined to find solutions that satisfy patient and said
rules and will be guaranteed to pass the buck, abstaining from any desire to
take individual responsibility for the well-being of the human being standing
before them. In the upper levels,
she can
be confident that those staff will generally not answer patient questions nor
let them finish speaking when they are making an important point. One high
level person even told me, “I wish I were as compassionate and open as you” —
this person’s favorite word to me otherwise was “denied.”
Even a minor example shows a patent
unwillingness to go the extra inch on the part of the staff I knew for a fact
that there was some juice in the back room when I asked for some. But the young
female insisted there was no juice. When I reminded her that I had been given
said juice by another staff worker not long before, only then did she bother to
look and indeed there was juice. I received no apology.
As an
empath, I can entirely understand the stress of the nursing station. Moreover,
in 1990 I spent over 100 hours volunteering in a Nursing home and I have served
a patient advocate on numerous occasions, including when my beloved teacher
John Strugnell was recovering from a stroke. I understand the hierarchy,
sociology and anthropology involved. I know that the staff are ever concerned
with safety and indeed are in fact concerned with patient well-being, up to a
point. They have to make quick and sometimes cold decisions to keep things
running smoothly and safely. They have to be very careful with the rules for
all sorts of reasons, not simply to keep their jobs. For this reason, I do not
blame the individual staff members so much as I blame the ethos of the
institution which is thoroughly rotten.
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