Few things are morestressfulthan being an emergency medical care provider, yet some people manage to make their job even more difficult than it already is.
An accident & emergency department worker, redditor ‘Disastrous_Encounter’, recently discussed the time they encountered someone who made their job needlessly difficult. There was a patient who came in with a sprained ankle, but that didn’t stop her from being rude to the staff and disparaging of the treatment she was getting, consequently resulting in her gettingpetty revenge, too.
Scroll down to find the full story below, where you will also findBored Panda’sinterview with the user ‘Disastrous_Encounter’, who was kind enough to answer a few of our questions.
Being a healthcare professional is a challenging job as it is
Image credits:Mikhail Nilov / pexels (not the actual photo)
But some people, like the patient in this story, can make it even more difficult
Image credits:MART PRODUCTION / pexels (not the actual photo)
Image credits:Disastrous_Encounter
Troublesome patients are unfortunately not that uncommon
Being a healthcare worker is far from easy, yet thousands of new professionals enter the workforce every year. In the UK, for instance, where the OP’s story took place, the number of such professionals has been increasing for more than a decade,Statista reports(with one drop in numbers during the Covid period in 2021).
According to said source, there were approximately 1.5 million health professionals employed in the United Kingdom in 2020. (Globally, there were reportedly more than65 millionof them working in the field in the same year.)
The redditor recalled that what got on their nerves the most was the patient’sarroganceand how rude she was to the nurses. “She complained about the wait, which was due to someone else being really sick, while she could wait with no ill effect. She implied we were incompetent for not dealing with her quickly as was her ‘right’ (when she actually had few).”
The OP emphasized that the patient was a particularly annoying example of a type they had dealt with before. “Most of the time we let it slide. That time I had the tools for petty revenge.”
Rude patients are “fuel for burnout”, the OP says
The OP added that rude and negative people make the job harder. “Placating them sufficiently so they don’t cause even more problems is a time sink and slows things down for everyone around them. It’s also demoralizing to know that you’ve done things right, but for some it is never good enough. That’s fuel for burnout.”
Experiencing burnout is, unfortunately, an unsurprising but upsetting reality of people who spend countless hours studying and working hard so they can help those in need. Needless to say, the recentpandemichasn’t made things any easier for the professionals in the field, either.
The least we can do to take better care of those who care for us is being respectful and kind to the healthcare workers that look after us. And if that is not enough for someone to change their rude behavior, having to pay for something that would have been free otherwise might do the trick.
Image credits:Cedric Fauntleroy / pexels (not the actual photo)
The OP provided fellow redditors with more details
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