The likelihood of the institutional structures we call our work-homes to meet our basic needs is poor overall. However, the lack deepens across lines of race, gender, and position on the ladder of the medical hierarchy. When these systems fail to care for their workers (and the patient), we have to turn to our own reserves to find what we need to keep going. This push for self-care is needed, but frankly, exhausting, on one’s own. One can only dig so deep. Leaning and depending on one another is a spectrum, and witnessing each other’s experiences and stories is the first gift we can offer one another as healthcare workers as we work toward a future of collectivized care and action.
We take care of human beings in the most vulnerable moments of their lives. This is, in addition to managing complex pathological processes, constantly changing technologies, and ever-increasing checklists and efficiency benchmarks in pursuit of higher reimbursement. When I have faced my own mortality as a cancer patient, every crumb of presence and attention my care workers gave me were precious emeralds. Human beings deserve, require, necessitate another human being’s caring, and anything less is an injury to both the patient and clinician. In the teetering pace and pressure of the contemporary healthcare worker, there is no time to attend to the spiritual or emotional experience of the human being in front of us, much less our own.
The most memorable wedding speech I ever heard was a mother of the groom’s toast to the couple. After the typical yawn-inducing ceremony or platitudes about love, she said something real and true about why we commit to the treacherous path of being in relationship: “we all need a witness.” At the core of our need for relationship, love, and community is the need to be seen. This is reflected in a common greeting in Zulu. Instead of Hello, the most common greeting, Sawubona, means something closer to “I See You.” The expected and joyful response is “I am here” or “I am seen.” We become more of ourselves by witnessing each other.
We’ve said it before, and we will say it again: the wellbeing of both patient and healthcare worker is bound together. Better said by MLK, “We are tied together in the single garment of destiny, caught in an inescapable network of mutuality.” Individual wellbeing initiatives have felt insulting to healthcare workers because they are only a band-aid and do not acknowledge the source of the suffering—a system bent on profit over people. We are thankful to organizations such as Impact in Healthcare and so many more that are organizing healthcare workers for action and reform. But in the meantime, we are here to do the equally foundational work of tending to and understanding our own experiences in community, in the belief that by tending to ourselves, we are tending to our patients.
This is why Anu and I are taking our fledgling, faltering steps into building spaces and communities of care for healthcare workers. While we wait, and hope, and dream of a new future, we must witness and care for each other in the present. We become more of ourselves by witnessing one another. We would love to have you with us. <3
With gratitude,
Anu & Laura
“The future will be different if we make the present different” - Peter Maurin
Do you radically believe that healthcare can be rooted in community, compassion, and justice?
Are you longing to connect with other healthcare workers who dream of humanizing healthcare?
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