Half of my job is customer service
9 October 2009That’s something they don’t tell you when you enter any of the branches of medicine, nursing, EMS, or practically anywhere in medicine and allied health: half of your job is going to be what amounts to customer service. Sick people are notoriously cranky, and since you usually can’t make them less-sick in minutes, getting them to feel as if you’ve helped them–and, indeed, feeling as if you have–usually takes a little bit more than medicine. You can call it “customer service,” you can call it “caring,” you can call it whatever you want–but it’s there. Just simple little things that we might not think of, but that aren’t strictly required: I don’t have to spent 5 minutes of my time showing patients their X-rays on the computer, but it’s amazing how much something so seemingly trivial can mean to them.
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