Reminder

It’s easy for me to forget that I work at a hospital. Oh, sure, when people ask where I work, I have the answer, but the reality is that I do not work in the hospital. I park on Level 4 of my garage before I walk to my office on the top floor of the administration wing, which is the farthest point from the main care-providing areas. It takes me twenty minutes to walk to the cafeteria and back. We don’t hear any announcements over the public address system. If I don’t leave my desk during the day — which is often the case — I would not come into contact with patients at all. For all intents and purposes, I work at an office.

Today, a physician called about a submission to a scientific journal that uses an online interface, like many other publications. She was a little nervous about transferring files and reviewing proofs, so I went to her office to help. I went down the three flights of stairs to the bottom of my building, walked over to the connecting bridge, followed signs for the south elevators, took them up to the third floor, and made my way to the anesthesiology department. On the way, I greeted a mother and her son, a pre-teen boy almost my height who kept drifting over to the walls to trace out shapes with his finger — a “J” on a locker, an arrow on a sign, and a “1″ on an exam room door. We rode up on the elevators together, and they got out on the second floor.

I sat next to the physician for the next forty minutes and walked her through the submission process to make sure sure that all of the files were included, everything was labeled correctly, and she had saved a copy of the proof. About halfway through, there was a beep on the PA system:

“Attention. Attention, please. Code tag alert. Outpatient lobby. Code tag alert.”

Thanks to my new employee orientation, I remembered that a tag alert meant that a patient was crossing a certain boundary without permission. Usually, it’s a child who is being discharged, but the staff forgot to remove their alert wristband, and it’s no big deal. Sometimes, however, the child is being moved unsafely, without consent, so this alert can be very serious. The safety representative at my orientation made it clear that if we were ever near the location of a tag alert, we should get out of the way, and fast, to make room for security people. I took a deep breath at this announcement. I was glad to be out of the way, but I hoped everything was okay for that patient.

During the walk back to my office, I heard the “all clear” for the tag alert. Good. The relatively short time span meant that the alert was a false alarm, so no one was being abducted or hurt.

Relieved, I sat down at my desk. My next project was to lay out a research poster, and I was startled to read its content: a congenital skin disorder that newborn babies don’t survive for more than a day. I am ashamed to admit that I couldn’t bear to look at some of the images of the disease, but after the initial shock wore off, the reality set in that the pictures showed someone’s baby who couldn’t even be held because of severe pain. It was a stark reinforcement that health care exists because people are not always healthy, even to the point of heartbreaking conditions.

I think working in the medical field is always challenging, but it’s different, somehow, with children. I should be more mindful that my daily tasks of submitting research papers, editing manuscripts, and laying out posters all goes to the improvement of care for these kids. I need remember that I really do work in a hospital.