Private vs. Public

My last placement was women’s health and during my time there I had a conversation with my Curtin supervisor about private and public patients. As I was on placement in a public hospital and my supervisor worked elsewhere in a private hospital, she made the comment that often we see patients in the private sector more enthusiastic to learn what a women’s health physio has to educate them on, more so following childbirth, than in the public sector, as patients in the private sector had to pay for the service to see a physio.

Whereas in the public sector, well in the facility I was at, we got a blanket referral to see all the patients on the ward and if there were any patients with specific complications needing intervention then we would of course see them for that particular complication. In the beginning I thought that this was quite an over generalisation, but as the weeks went by it became more and more clear those patients who were of a higher socio-economic status in the public hospital were more inclined to take on board the information provided and ask questions and consciously practice the exercises because they could clearly see the benefit of doing it correctly, than those who presented with relative disinterest to the topic of conversation. I know that women’s health is the nicest topic of conversation or education however it is so much more important to try and somehow develop rapport with those disinterested patients to help even bring to their attention some health issues that they may never had heard of or cared about previously because they are the ones, more often than not, who are at a greater risk of women’s health issues later on in life.

From that placement I think I most importantly learnt how to read patients non verbal communication signs better than most of my other placements, and those patients who were interested obviously gained the most out of the education session, but it’s a reminder that we can not forget about the other relatively disinterested patients, in all areas of physio, because these are the patients that actually have the most to gain even out of a simple 10 minute education session.