Tema-Ghana, Aug. 01, GNA – The toughest thing to do as a medical practitioner is to write the death certificate of a patient who had just passed on, Dr. Barbara Ayesha Anawana Karbo, a medic has said.
She noted that Medical Officers and Nurses go through a lot of pain after losing a patient, stressing that when a doctor carries the grief of previous deaths, they will begin to doubt their diagnosis and capabilities.
“Most Doctors and Nurses develop some form of friendship with their patients, so when the person dies, momentarily it affects you physically, mentally, and emotionally; however, the next patient is waiting for treatment,” Dr. Karbo, who is the Head of the Accident and Emergency Department at the International Maritime Hospital (IMaH) said.
In that state of mind, when attending to the next patient, being thoughtful and fearful of applying the same diagnosis that led to the previous death will cause more fatalities.
Dr. Karbo stated this at the weekly “Your Health! Our Collective Responsibility,” a Ghana News Agency Tema Regional Office initiative aimed at promoting health-related communication and providing a platform for health information dissemination to influence personal health choices through improved health literacy.
The Ghana News Agency’s Tema Regional Office developed the public health advocacy platform “Your Health! Our Collective Responsibility” to investigate the elements of four health communication approaches: informing, instructing, persuading, and urging.
Dr. Karbo noted also that, at the beginning of every medical officer’s practice, it was scary seeing a person die, which scared them, and sometimes they needed to take days off to get over the trauma of the death.
She said doctors also sometimes go for counselling so that they do not appear careless.
“We go through emotional challenges when we lose a patient, but in order not to carry it along, which may affect the life of another patient, they put up, which sometimes the public classified as numbness.”
She revealed that from the perspective of the public, it looked faint-hearted to look unbothered when someone dies, which was understandable but was a coping mechanism for doctors and nurses not to endanger any other person.
The IMaH Accident and Emergency Specialist, appealed to the public not to dehumanize doctors and nurses because they have emotions and are hurt by the deaths of people, especially young ones.
She noted that there were incidents of doctors committing suicide for failing to save a life.
Dr Karbo stressed that medical practitioners’ apparent numbness to the death of a patient is a coping mechanism not to carry the burdens of the death to endanger the treatment of other patients at the hospital.
She, therefore, discarded the notion among a section of the public that medical professionals are careless about the deaths of patients.
She also called on the public to support medical practitioners emotionally, physically, and psychologically: “We are not superhuman beings; we need your support to deliver”.
