Working in a hospital brings a lot of interesting social conundrums. For instance, the higher your degree, it seems, the less you have to care about people. Granted, this is a sweeping generalization, but for the most part it is true. Doctors could give a crap about people who keep this hospital clean and sanitized and safe from bacteria. I'm grateful every day for the people who clean up the blood off the floor, wash the laundry, dispose of the bio-hazard waste, and disinfect the surfaces of our 6 floor hospital (do you realize how many freaking surfaces there onn on just ONE floor?). Most of the time these people have little schooling, some of them have mental/physical problems, some are living just above the poverty level and get paid for literally cleaning up after all the shit that goes down in a hospital.
I try and at least take the time to say hello to them as I pass by them. When I worked at a smaller hospital, I would have daily conversations with them, they were fantastic people who always tried to brighten up someones day regardless of how tired, how sore, or how frustrating their life was going. I really have a lot of respect and high regard for them.
I'm starting to really have a problem with doctors. Since joining the medical field nearly 4 years ago I really quickly started to lose respect and faith for doctors. Again this is a SWEEPING generality. There are some AMAZING doctors out there, for instance the doctors who lend their expertise and knowledge to countries and people much less fortunate that us here in the U. S. of A. And the doctors who dedicate their lives to research to cure diseases or take care of our wounded soldiers.
I'm talking about regular old doctors, specifically doctors who work solely in a hospital. I can't make any assumptions about how it works in clinics because I've never worked in one. I'm not sure how many people realize how little doctors do in a hospital setting. The usually run through the patients they are in charge of like Paris Hilton runs through underwear.
From what I have observed, this is what a doctor does when it comes to one patient.
1. Glance through their chart for maybe 10 minutes
2. Rush in an out of a patients room literally as fast as they can (usually about 5 minutes, unless the patient is relentless)
3. Answer as little questions as possible both for the family and the patient or speak in medical jargon that a regular person would have no way of translating
4. Write a really long list of sometimes really retarded orders in a handwriting that channels a serial killer
5. Read their dictations into a phone so they don't have to type them in themselves for the computer charts
6. Boss around the nurses/cna's/anyone on the floor without a degree as high/higher than thiers
7. Then spend 30-40 minutes chatting it up with their other pedestal dwellers about nothing more important than their newest toy bought with their disturbingly large salary they earn simply because they went to school forever not because they actually do anything of substance
8. Coffee
9. Smoke break (the most ironic of ironic)
The sad thing is, they charge you OODLES for all of that when actually the only contact you had with the doctor is the 5 minutes he spent trying to get out of your room.
Now I have to take surgeons out of the mix, there is no way that they can pass off a surgery onto someone without as much schooling as they have. This is mostly directed at general doctors who get paid to do absolutely NOTHING! You might have also noticed that I keep using the pronoun He, as much as it pains me to say it due to the equal rights thing, female doctors (with a few exceptions, of course) generally aren't this cavalier with your health. (Most) women are naturally compassionate and healers.
Anyway I don't like doctors, especially when their personal photographers order me to get out of the way so they can be photographed talking on the phone and looking professional for some infinitely stupid reason.
It brings me back to a saying I once heard concerning the medical field "All doctors are healers, but not all healers are doctors"
No comments:
Post a Comment