In all Health disciplines are taught subjects related to empathy and communication. No matter if you are nursing assistant, technician emergency, nurse or physician, during the training period firmly believe that patient´s diseases are not only Physiology, and to recover professional and also the person behind the uniform is needed. 


Currently, we observe impassively what the feeling of a patient lying in the street could be, when the ambulance arrives: lights and sirens, people with uniform, punctures, pain and above all, uncertainty and fear to die.

Has someone introduced to this patient?

Has someone explained him what we are doing?


We put the patient on a stretcher, gets on the ambulance, increasingly seen more cables, tubes, saline solutions and alarms that whistle and he do not know why.

This patient is not knowing what is happening, generating a hideous anguish that surely also affects his hemodynamic stability. With a simple explanation of what is happening, and how he is, we would increase his sense of security. He does not feel helpless and even his vital signs will improve. 

If we make a chronological review of the history of Nursing, we observe a change of paradigms; a first stage where nurses were experts and the patient opinion did not count for anything, we moved forward to reaching the stage of integration; where we had to call the patient “customer” as if he were who chose get sick, and now currently we have started to hear his opinion, placing us in a paradigm of transformation where the patient is the main actor in all aspects, becoming a biopsychosocial model. 

Do we act like we think, or we have regressed to the Middle Ages?

Probably, our role as caregivers should be focus on the ill human being and not in the body. On the other hand we look like Healthcare has undergone a modernization which gives the impression that we have also transformed in machines, abandoning “the art of cure and care”, working like robots and forgetting that beyond the uniform, we are persons.

Let´s act as human beings and give our patients Humanity for both their healing and ours.

Carlos Martorell Campins (carlosmartorellcampins@gmail.com)Emergency Medical Technician and  Nursing student.


María del Castillo Ordoñez
Nurse at Hospital Son Llàtzer.