Before I was accepted to medical school, I was a medical technologist. This basically means I worked in the laboratory at a large hospital. I was playing one of the “behind the scenes” roles that many of us probably played while we were getting the medical experience required to get into med school.
Med techs are the people who run the CBC’s, comprehensive metabolic panels, amylases, lipases, pregnancy tests, urinalyses, cross-matches, etc. etc. ordered by the doctors. Usually, I was in direct contact with the nurses and doctors, who either called my line directly or came down to the lab if something needed to be clarified or a specimen needed to be delivered.
I’ll tell you right now the difference between a good day and a bad day at work. Two factors contributed: how swamped we were with patient samples, and how good of a mood the doctors/nurses were in (I say “doctors/nurses” because the moods of these two groups of people usually parallel each other quite well on any given day, and often the doctors communicate to other staff through nurses).
Of course, no matter what part of healthcare you work in, there are going to be days when the patients just don’t stop coming and you can’t catch a break. That’s unavoidable; the only thing you can do then is pray to the all-powerful but oft malicious gods of healthcare for some sort of respite.
But the second factor is something you and I can do something about as future doctors. I don’t know what your feelings are on “Reaganomics” (a.k.a. “trickle-down economics”), but I can tell you for sure that “trickle-down attitude” is most definitely a thing. If a doctor has an ungrateful, self-important, entitled, or simply negative attitude, then all of the people that doctor works with will absorb that negative energy.
As a med tech, I absorbed plenty of this negativity while working long night shifts. I’ve been yelled at for not having the test results of an order that was never put in. I’ve been hassled unnecessarily for CSF WBC counts before the tubes had even gotten to the lab. I’ve been berated by frazzled nurses because I needed them to get me a redraw due to hemolysis. Every time this happened, it shifted my stress and discontentedness level up a notch. It only takes a few notches to ruin an entire shift,and a few bad shifts in a row can cause burnout to quickly sink in. Work becomes death. Getting out of bed before a shift becomes nigh impossible. It gets more and more difficult to be fully engaged at work, which increases the likelihood of errors.
It’s not just med techs, either. The same thing happens to all allied health professionals. Phlebotomists, X-ray techs, radiology techs, nurses, CNA’s, orderlies, and even janitorial staff are affected by how the doctors in the facility are acting. Whether we like it or not, being a doctor means being a leader. So please, I beg you: be kind to your med techs (and everyone else).
Featured image:
Work Hard And Be Kind Wallpaper by Clay Larsen