A Prescription for Change: How Difficult Experiences can Lead to Important Discoveries

Premed students know the drill: get as many clinical hours as possible to be competitive for acceptance into medical school. Like many of my peers, I too heard that being an emergency medical technician (EMT) was a great way to get patient experience and practice provider autonomy. I signed up to take an accelerated EMT course in my hometown over winter break last year, and it took about a month to complete. In the spring, I took the National Registry of Emergency Medical Technicians Exam (NREMT) and applied to volunteer with a local rescue squad. Initially, I was excited (and nervous) to treat and talk to patients for the first time. I thought about my shifts days in advance and wondered what types of calls I would get. As with anything new, however, this feeling soon evolved into routine. Eventually, EMT work started to feel like any other extracurricular. Until one day, it didn’t.

One night during my EMT shift, we received a call about an individual in distress due to overdose, and we rushed to respond. Upon our arrival, the patient had already been treated with Narcan, a life-saving drug to treat opioid overdose. Once the patient was transported to the ambulance, they refused to go to the hospital. We spent the next 45 minutes frantically trying to convince them to go to the hospital before the Narcan wore off. No matter what we said or whom we called to try and convince them, the patient’s mind was made up. They could not afford the hospital fees and wanted to leave the ambulance. Legally, since we could not force the patient to go to the hospital, we had to watch them walk away knowing that it could have fatal consequences. Witnessing this quickly exposed me to one of the harsh realities of our healthcare system—how financial insecurity can jeopardize a life. Somewhere amid the chaos, I remember the patient mumbled they had a kid at home who was waiting for them, a statement that was left indelible in my mind.

Coming back to the station, I talked to some of my colleagues about what happened. One of them then shared their own challenging experience. They’d been dispatched to a “welfare check,” meaning they went into someone’s house to check on them and make sure everything was okay. When they went in, they quickly realized that the patient had passed away several days prior. This meant that no one had checked up on them for days. More than the patient’s appearance or the transport procedure, my colleague remembered that the patient’s television was still on—an eerie testament to the isolation they must have endured. From a TV remaining on to someone having a family waiting for them back home, we tend to remember the little things about others that make them human. We know how it feels to have someone you love waiting on you, and what it means to feel lonely. Noticing and remembering these details can make a job in healthcare infinitely harder.

Seeing people slip through the cracks of our healthcare system isn’t easy, whether due to a lack of financial security or an absence of community for someone who needs to be checked up on. If I’m being honest, seeing these flaws of our system firsthand initially made me reconsider if I wanted to be a doctor. However, overtime I’ve realized that difficult moments like these are opportunities to deepen my empathy for others and inspire me to advocate for change. Instead of just simply treating patients, I strive to be a physician who can increase access to preventative care in susceptible communities and create improvements in our healthcare system beyond a hospital stay or doctor’s visit.

It is easy for patients to be reduced to “clinical hours” and “interesting procedures,” but as aspiring doctors, we should treat the system as well as the patients. If we listen to (and not just hear) our patients, we will notice exactly how the system has failed them, which is the first step to fixing it. While these experiences have forced me to question my path, they have also instilled in me a sense of responsibility. It is through our commitment to understanding systemic failures that we can contribute to a healthcare system that truly serves everyone.