The Healing Touch

Through the reality of experiencing the seemingly endless and relentless spinal surgeries I have endured in the last 7 years, this has unknowingly made me a self professed assessor of our health care professionals in Queensland. This is my experience and opinion.

Being a Registered Nurse for 12 years, I know it takes a special person to tick all the boxes to qualify as a ‘Super Nurse,’ as my husband named me, and gifted me number plates for my car with this title, ha ha, bless 💖 Switching from, ‘Super Nurse,’ to patient, I believe I can give an honest review of the state of our health care professionals and the service they offer.

This is where I take a deep breath and exhale a sigh of utter disappointment and shame in our Government and the state of the hospitals and nursing staff.

When did everything start to go so wrong?When did the quality of inpatient care loose its standards, and actually dropped, ‘Care,’ ? When did the ability to show genuine compassion die?

Every year I tell myself, this year I’ll have a positive experience, there must still be ‘Super Nursers’ out there? Unfortunately in the past 7 years of having multiple spinal operations, procedures and a total hysterectomy, I can honestly say there has only been two inpatient stays where I had a positive experience when assessing the nursing care I received.

My last hospital stay was just a week ago. I was praying, yep sixth time lucky, this will be the best one yet. Well I was wrong. This experience rates as the top worst two!

Being a patient can be one of the scariest experiences in life. You are vulnerable, you relinquish your control and freely put all your trust in our health care professionals to get it right. Whilst I was contemplating writing a letter of complaint to the hospital about the lack of care I received which lead to a code red call and two non epileptic seizures, I paused for a moment as a thought stopped me in my tracks.

Why or what has caused this drastic shift in our health care professionals competence, compassion and care?
Have they pulled the plug on care?

When I think of a nurse I envisage a young, bubbly, happy, smiling, servant hearted person. If you blink, you may miss the flash of their super hero cape as they solve one problem after the next while lovingly holding your hand when it all gets too much. They are born to live a life of service to their community. As stereotypical as this may sound, that is exactly what I want to experience when going into hospital. So why are we seeing the complete opposite? The majority of healthcare professionals I have come into contact with only tick one of these crucial boxes to qualify as a ‘super nurse,’ and that is their qualifications.

I believe everything deteriorated and drastically declined since COVID. I can say this as I had one of my spinal surgeries while we were in the thick of COVID, and that was the pits. No visitors to be your advocate, no compassion to be seen for miles. Again resulting in a code red call, leaving me with added PTSD.

But why has this happened? I believe through my experience our healthcare professional , nursers, have be bullied, pushed around, threatened, given dreadful working conditions, unrealistic expectations , virtually no support, since COVID. The government have literally squeezed the actual life out of the all our superhero’s. I’m calling a code red, our Healthcare needs immediate resuscitation.

My daughter is also studying nursing and while on her practical placement one of the senior nurses openly shared that she hates her job so much that she wanted to jump off the hospital roof. Nursers are retiring a lot later these days as they have lost their money through investments in the recession, therefore we are continuing to employ tired, resentful, jaded nurses, who are bitter, burnt out and outright cruel. Again I experienced this type of nurse in ICU, she even stole my breakfast ! You know there is a genuine problem in our Health care system when a nurse steals food from a patient. So what are we doing about it?

Everyone wants to be shown love and compassion, whether you are the patient or a nurse, we all need to be shown and experience the healing touch.

Our heath care professionals haven’t received compassion in the form of action, regarding their ever changing roles in their workplaces which has definitely effected their mental well being. Their work load was drastically increased when family weren’t allowed to visit during COVID, which reduced the time for that healing touch to be shown. Holistic care was non existent!

All they have been given is more requirement’s, paperwork, working condition that are below pare, hours that would destroy any soul, incompetent staff to work with and staff that want to kill themselves. Our nursers have been reduced to do the bare minimum, to get patience’s in and out. ‘Care,’ has become extinct. Their superpowers have been stripped from them without them knowing.

The graduates coming through at the moment have told me that there is, ‘NO WAY,’ they are going to work in the wards. They all hated it and dreaded working with the Registered Nurses who constantly claimed they hate their jobs and treated the students as an inconvenience. I feel so sad when I hear this as I said before, I worked as a Registered Nurse in the wards for many years, in multiple fields and levels. These were some of the best days of my life. This is where I made life long friends. I absolutely loved my job. I thoroughly enjoyed preceptoring students, and continue to encourage them every hospital stay I have. I had one poor student nurse break down in front of me, after I told her she was doing a great job. She would come in and see me every shift for her morning cuddle and would give me a huge smile on her way home.

So if our health care professionals; nursers are working in these conditions, where is the room for the healing touch, which is the drug of choice for the soul?

So before I started scribing a complaint letter about the service, or lack of, I put myself in our superhero’s shoes. I stopped and realised that our front line professionals have also been dealt a bad hand and they too have not experienced the healing touch. Compassion is the most important and critical component to live out ones chosen career, without it you can turn bitter, resentful and start to hate your job.

We have to get back what we have lost. It’s has to start somewhere, share the healing touch with everyone you met, say thank you, tell them they are doing a great job, this is where the healing can begin to mend our superhero’s souls. A healing touch can fix anything that is broken.

Christine Bunn

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