Unrealisitic expectations...

[scattycarrot]

Ok, this may see a bit random but I was watching Greys Anantomy last night(on DVD) and it got me thinking about the publics unrealistic expectations of healthcare. It seems to me, in my experience as an ER nurse, that peple who have no medical training seem to think that ill health or trauma, etc...can be cured by a magic wave of the Doctors wand and that having an operation is low risk. Why do people fail to grasp that any operation has its risks? I can't tell you the amount of times patients and relatives have just said flippantly, "why don't you just operate and/or put them to sleep" as if there are no complications to doing so. I realise its part of our job to educate but it seems that even when you point out the risks (infection, DVT, PE and oh yeah, that small thing called death) hardly any one seems actually grasp the potential magnitude of problems that can result from surgery. And I am talking about any surgery as I am sure we have all heard stories of being dying folowing so-called 'minor surgery'. It was a statement by Bailey(on Greys Anatomy) that got me thinking about this when she said.."Sometimes you just get people on the table and they just die" and it is very true. With comments like this and some of the stories they show I think this programme is doing a good job of showing the real world as opposed to programmes like House or ER that are good entertainment but show pateints surviving the stangest medical problems and numerous cycles of CPR, etc.. Its not just this either, people just don't seem to accept that there should be any illness or ill health these days and head to the ER or doctors with any miniscule ache and pain and expect us to wave that magic wand again. Why don't people take analgesia, for example? People present with a week history of backpain or similiar and you ask them what meds they have taken and they say something like...'none, I dont want to mask the symptons'...ahhhhhhh!!!!!Or they have a viral illness and want antibiotics! I could go on but I have rambled enough!

So whats led to this? Has the medical profession shrouded their work in such mystery that this is the result? Is it lack of education? Is it the media?Or, am I talking nonsense?

Just interested to hear your thoughts??!!

[EmmaG, RN]

I've wondered about this myself. In the years I've been a nurse, there has been a definite change in the public perception and expectations of medical / hospital care. I certainly don't want to go back to the old days of never questioning the docs, but there has to be a happy medium here.

Is it TV and movies? The media? The hospitals bending over backward (and sometimes ridiculously so) in the name of 'customer service'? Fear of litigation?

Probably a little of all of that. I know it's pretty damned frustrating, regardless.

I had to laugh at the posts about post-op patients wanting NO pain... had one the other night who insisted I "knock him out completely" so he wouldn't feel any pain at all. All of my explanations fell on deaf ears. I tried to assure him I would do all I could to get his pain to a level he could manage; that wasn't good enough. He became increasingly rude and demanding. I finally told him that in order to give him enough pain medicine to accomplish that goal, he would probably stop breathing as well.

That shut him up.

[scattycarrot, BSN, RN]

The hospitals bending over backward (and sometimes ridiculously so) in the name of 'customer service'? Fear of litigation? .

This defiantely plays a part in peoples pre and mis-conceptions of hospitals as they aren't hospitals anymore ,they are more like hotels, with every whim and every need pampered too. Its almost like we gloss over the truth. When hospitals used to look like hospitals and have THAT smell, you knew where you stood. Nowadays patients come in and the seriousness of their situation does not hit them as they still have their home comforts and their cable tv,etc.. People seem to think that coming in for surgery or whatever is routine and run of the mill, just like going to get your car fixed. My grandmother was a matron many moons ago and I remember as a child going in to see her at work and I was scared to be in her hospital because it smelt funny and everyone was very serious... .I am not saying we should go back to those times but nowadays as the quote above states hospitals bend backwards and its all about customer service. Well, I guess it doesn't matter if you died in the OR, at least you had popcorn and the movie channel pre-operatively....

[Jo Dirt]

People do not realize that medicine is NOT an exact science.

People also refuse to acknowledge their own mortality. Life expectance has gone up, but diseases that humans never lived long enough to suffer from now are commonplace.

I also wish people would realize there is NO CURE for OLD AGE.

Mainly, my father-in-law and mother-in-law. He is 82 and she is 80, she says "I never thought I would get old.", he says, "if I could just get over this Parkinson's I could go back to work" and they both say, "if I could just find a 'pill' to fix me"

So they each shuffle around with a big sack of pills, hundreds and hundreds of dollars a month wasted because they keep holding onto a thin strand of hope that deliverance is just beyond the horizon.

I don't want to live long enough to get in the shape so many old people are in, it just isn't worth it.