A one night hospital stay for a minor surgery makes me ponder about the acute need for healthcare services in an increasingly aging population.
As there was a shortage of single room ward I was sent to a four bedder ward for recovery. As the layout of the rooms are quite open one can actually hear noises from the opposite room as well. Out of the 4 patients in my room 3 including me are seniors above 65.
From my observation, the nurses do not seem to have any moment of rest. This is especially so at night. Maybe it was just my bad luck or maybe it was the side effect of the general anesthesia that made me sensitive to light and sound. First of all the elderly lady in the next bed forewarned me that she could only sleep with the overhead bed light on. She told me to draw the partition curtain but the top of the curtain was some netting material where light can shine through. Then there was another elderly patient in the opposite ward who did not sleep throughout the night and kept wanting to chat with the nurses at the top of her voice and was stalking one nurse as she attended to other patients.
When told she was supposed to stay in bed and not walk the corridors she shouted "Why can't I walk the corridors? You cannot control me. I am not your SERVANT!" What an irony! Who is in servitude? You just need one patient to misbehave and you can hear all the beeping sound from other awakened patients calling nurses to help bring bed pans or to go toilet etc. Of course now that I am well and reflect on the situation I can appreciate how overwhelmed the nurses were. However when one is sickly like when I was feeling nauseous under the lingering effect of the GA I can also be unreasonable. So I too rang the bell. When the nurse came and asked what I needed I just simply told her "Don't chat with patient at night!" That was when she confided that she was being stalked.
If you stay in a shared room in hospital you can appreciate the unimaginable amount of care needed for each patient. From bathing or sponging, wheeling in and out for scan/x-ray, changing linens, regular blood pressure and temperature taking, walking the patients by physiotherapists, regular medicine taking, serving of meals, change of dressings, attending to visiting relatives' queries not to mention the ward doctor and the consultants' visitations. The ward is always buzzing with staff. Many of the nurses and healthcare staff are foreigners. It makes me shudder to think about the manpower requirement to fulfill the healthcare needs with our fast aging population and decreasing birth rate.
When the nurses came to help clean my dirty bottoms, I felt so grateful and ashamed to have been so demanding. Nursing is truly a very noble profession and they really should be well paid. Before I checked out I commended 2 nurses in the feedback form. That is the least I could have done.
