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BY ROMA GONZALES
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Not grumpy, just hangry!
HOW do you expect a person, tired and hungry, to respond to stress?
Unless the particular person is a candidate for canonization or has an emotional dysregulation, the natural reaction would along be the lines of irritable to cranky to angry. This emotional state is termed “hangry” – a bastard from the ill-fated marriage of “angry” and hungry.”
Say, if you are a scholar of the human psychology and would like to look more into this phenomenon, it’s easy to find subjects as there are plenty of impoverished Filipinos. But for interesting interviewees, you can have President Duterte himself or our Philippine government hospital workers, particularly the doctors and nurses.
When President Digong received backlash after stating that the Philippines can do without the United Nations, Department of Foreign Affairs Secretary Yasay excused his manners by claiming that he was only tired and hungry.
If the Head of State acknowledges the validity of the adverse effects of this emotional state, perhaps Negros Oriental Rep. Arnulfo Teves would be so kind as to re-examine and investigate the origins of these hospital horror stories. Apparently, the congressman proposed last week to post signages in government hospitals stating “Bawal ang Masungit.”
He said, as told in a Philippine daily Inquirer article, that he himself experienced the ill-treatment from government hospital personnel after going undercover. Through this proposal, he hopes to protect the indigent members of the community who can only afford public healthcare services from being shouted at or talked down by the personnel.
While it is a noble intention to champion the poor, it is only like leaving the cinema at the middle of the screening and saying you know the rest of the story.
As someone who had worked in a government hospital even for a few months, I can attest that some doctors and nurses are indeed cranky. Patients get screamed and cursed at. Patients are snubbed. But these happen just as often too in our public health institutions: Nurses scream at fellow nurses; doctors curse other doctors; nurses and doctors snob one another–and so do the medical technologists, the orderlies, the radiologists, etc.
How can one smile when there are sixty patients who have to be entertained at the same time? When you skipped breakfast and lunch so they could receive their medications and procedures?
As stated by Health secretary Paulyn Ubial in the same article, the “Philippines could only allocate 6 percent of its budget for health” and there is one doctor for every 33,000 Filipinos. In the real setting, sometimes there is only one nurse for 50 or more patients. When you can barely find a bladder break, God knows where you can find patience for three dozen patients.
In a notorious ward here in the city, patients grow up to more than a hundred and share beds with one another. Sometimes there is only one staff nurse who has to be responsible for all of them. The nurse relievers can’t even take home P8, 000 per month. That salary raise nurses are clamoring about? I hope the President finds a way, now that he understands what it’s like to be “hangry.”
These grumpiness and rudeness are real, and they are but a sign and a symptom like a fever or a vertigo that begs to be examined so as to diagnose the disease and give it its proper treatment.
It shouldn’t be “Don’t be grumpy!” but rather, “Why are they so grumpy? What can we do then?” Perhaps as lawmakers, now that Rep. Teves himself has a personal experience, he can lead in forwarding our healthcare system where both workers and clients can be happy./PN
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