Pages

Tuesday, March 15, 2005

RMH ....the placement

"I hate medical students! The last time, I saw...they examined my heart without my permission and they treated me not as a patient but as a thing to be played with..."

It was the opening statement from one patient I interviewed this morning at Royal Melbourne Hospital. Hearing upon that, surprised am I. Now, this will be harder for me. More difficult to establish rapport with this kind of attitude.

I was interviewing this patient with another female medical students. She quickly explored further on the reasons he hate medical students. He told us that the previous medical students never asked his permission (informed consent) and straight away examined his heart despite his protest. He was that time was feeling unwell since he was admitted to the hospital due to sudden heart failure. From there onwards, we got and learned a lot of Health Practise stuff. We learned on the financial stress being patient from low socioeconomic status and the burden of medication and treatment/ heart operations in Australia health care system.

I then proceed to eliciting his presenting complaint and managed in the process, to build up his trust on the medical students again. I also encouraged him to tell about those event on the doctor and he said, he will think about it.

Now, the hospital attachment was supposed to be a learning environment for me to learn all those clinical stuff but today, I was lucky. Beside learning the chest examination, I also grabbed important concepts of the health care system. Plus, learned the ethics too.

Interesting indeed.....

No comments: