During my time here at Crossroads Health Center West, I have not only learned more about the providers who serve the patient population, but also the patient population that we serve. It’s one thing to read and hear on the Crossroads website about serving an underprivileged population. It’s another to actually serve the patients. Through my time here at Crossroads Health Center, I have only scratched the surface of the concept of empathy.
I was fortunate enough as a VIP to have the opportunity to shadow Dr. Ng at Crossroads Health Center West location. When shadowing, I quickly realized that Dr. Ng and the other providers were much different than the providers that I had previously shadowed. Not that the other providers I previously shadowed didn’t care for their patients, but one could recognize immediately there was a different kind of compassion and care in the office. I remember looking at Dr. Ng’s desk and looking at all the drawings and at first, I thought she was saving her children’s drawings but then I realized after asking, that a patient would give her drawings from time to time and she would hang them on her desk.
I vividly remember witnessing a conversation that Dr. Ng had with an elderly patient during a checkup. This patient was on oxygen, couldn’t walk properly, was severely overweight, unemployed, and didn’t have anyone to take care of him. He told Dr. Ng that he was scared of dying and those words really stuck with me. Dr. Ng sat down next to the patient and started talking with him, not about “healthcare”, but about how he was doing. This experience has really changed my perspective on patients and providers, that as an aspiring clinical provider I think that it is critically important to try and understand what it really means to have empathy. Patients are people, members of our community and that is something very valuable that I learned at Crossroads.
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