Anyone who knows me doesn´t be surprise if I begin this post with a proverb: “It is a trait of the high-born to be grateful”.

The unique claim of these words is to honor to all those intensive care professionals (intensivists, nurses, assistants, cleaners, secretaries and guards) who have preceded us in the work of “the critical patient care”; many of them are still active, many others already retired and some deaths.

A great part of the training in our work, I think that starts from the “learning by observation”. It consists on the changes occurring in the conduct of a person as a result of consistent in observing another expert one.

For sure that every one of you, as myself, have learned of day to day observation of every and each one of our olders. We have imitated behaviors with which felt identified or precisely the opposite: fled and tried to change attitudes observed, trying to improve them. All this is part of our learning, and without that point of heading we wouldn´t be where we are. As it currently said by fashion “safety policies”: we learn also from errors and From them we create proposals of change.

Thank you for your example, by your “day to day”. Thank you for how, when and how much to give information to families and patients; thank you for how you give and tend your hands, thank you for fighting for “Life” and how you recognice and know accompanying at the end, thank you for facing death.

Thank you for your daily struggle to defend what you thought, goingagainst everyone and everything. Thank you for your teamwork, for transmitting consistency with each of your behaviors.

Finally thanks to all those professionals who without putting a name to what they did were accompanied and remain so throughout their professional career of the “H” of the humanization, unknowingly they already wrote the ICU with a capital H.

As Teresa de Calcuta said: “Blessed all those who give without remembering and receive without forgetting”.

 

Dr. Milagros Sancho González
Intensive Care Unit. H.G.U.Gregorio Marañón