Chaplain's Corner

Our health care system here in Manitoba is one of our greatest blessings but all too often we don’t appreciate this benefit of living in our Province. One of the reasons we don’t appreciate this blessing we all enjoy is that we allow the media to determine our attitude. The business of the media is to find the most captivating story of the day and tell that story. The problem is that we have this insatiable appetite for the tragic. We would rather, or so the media believes, hear a story about some horrible failure in our health care system than the thousands upon thousands of success stories that are being lived out every day in hospitals and nursing homes and clinics around Manitoba.

I’m no exception. I heard a story on the news of a woman being released from an emergency department who then died before she gets to her front door and I’m incensed. I heard a story of a man who is ignored in a waiting from for more than 30 hours only to be found dead of an infection that could have easily been treated. I want to mount my white horse and ride into the fray to correct such indignities. But if the news reported that today that 400 people were treated and released from the hospital having recovered well from a surgery or a medical emergency, I would go “Ho-hum”.

The truth of the matter is that every day both are happening, every day mistakes are made, diagnoses are missed, tests are misinterpreted, and people suffer and at the same time, many time more are correctly diagnosed, tests are accurately read and acted upon to the benefit of the patient. Medicine is not simply a science – it is also an art. It is not merely scans and blood tests and x-rays, it is people interacting and communicating with each other. Medicine is sociological and anthropological and spiritual; it requires a knowledge of people and cultures and customs. Medicine is about trust: Doctors trusting patients to accurately report symptoms and patients trusting doctors to listen and hear and understand and figure out what is going on.

Medicine is messy business. It involves the family dynamics of the patient, the health care staff and the group dynamics of the staff on any given shift. It involves personal biases, prejudices: we all have them whether we want to admit it or not. Medicine is messy because life is messy and when you throw in pain and confusion and fear, the mess only gets messier.

Now, we don’t want to reckon with these realities. We want our medicine clinical, we want it cut and dry, we want problems presented to be met with problems resolved. We want our medicine neat and clean without confusion, without compromising circumstances and confusing dynamics. But what we want is not reality, it is fiction.

It has been my observation both as a player in the system and a consumer of the system that the deepest dissatisfaction with our health care system isn’t about not having access to this test or that test as quickly as we might want but our failure to realize that it is the human factor that is key. Being aware of these many dynamics, respecting them, owning our part in them is every bit as important as the science.

We can sit back and focus on the systems failures, this does have value; or we can engage the system and be as fully present and call those who care for us to be as fully present as possible. We can honor our weaknesses and our strengths, we can accept and own the failures when they happen and we can balance our perspective and realize that despite the weaknesses we have one of the best health care systems in the world.