Doctors and Nurses: Dealing with the Emotional Toll of Patient Care
Work in a hospital or health center involves seeing, day by day, patients and families deal with a process as complex and delicate as disease, whether it’s their own or someone else’s, and in any of its variants. For health professionals, like the neurologist Cristina Guijarro and nurse Ana Duro, taking care of patients goes beyond just treating their medical conditions. With years of experience under their belts, these professionals have faced numerous challenges that have shaped their approach to patient care and their own emotional well-being.
Cristina Guijarro, a neurologist with three decades of experience, remembers feeling insecure in her early years as an R4. Her mentor’s words, “Two or three years will pass and there will come a time when everything you have learned will be intertwined in your head and you will be able to solve patient problems,” still resonate with her today. While the passage of time has proven her mentor right, Guijarro admits that fear and concern for patients never truly dissipates. She emphasizes that even with experience, taking home patient cases of critical illnesses is inevitable.
One of the cases that has marked Guijarro the most is the one where a patient’s wife, who was unable to understand her husband’s clinical situation, gave her the courage to intervene. The patient’s wife conveyed to Guijarro to “do whatever I had to do,” as she was the only one who knew how to ‘save’ her husband. The successful surgical intervention and the gratitude from the patient’s wife are moments that have stayed with Guijarro throughout her career.
On the other hand, Ana Duro, a nurse with 34 years of experience, highlights the importance of emotional management in patient care. She emphasizes that while the main goal is care management, it is equally important for health professionals to take care of themselves emotionally. Duro recalls a case of a teenager with multiple sclerosis that deeply impacted her and emphasizes the inevitability of personal emotional involvement in patient care.
As a seasoned nurse, Duro advises her younger colleagues to acknowledge their own emotions and seek professional help when necessary to maintain their emotional well-being. She underlines the impact of these scenarios on the well-being of nurses and the importance of preventing emotional responses from affecting their daily life.
Both Guijarro and Duro’s experiences shed light on the emotional toll healthcare professionals face while caring for patients. Their advice and experiences are essential in guiding and supporting younger generations of healthcare professionals in their careers. Their insights serve as a reminder that while patient care is paramount, self-care and emotional support are equally important for sustaining a fulfilling and impactful career in healthcare.