My placement involved me reading and summarising serious incident (SI) reports which involved confidential information about patient suicides or serious harm cases. These cases were several pages long and in some cases around 16 pages of patient history and causes. The extensive detail in these cases was very overwhelming at first and finding just the key parts I needed was hard to achieve as I was lost in a sea of personal information. As I was searching for ways to improve care it was hard to ignore so many things that were not provided by the service that I wish could have been helped with. My thematic analysis involved issues with care and what could be improved whether it was engagement with patients and increasing their activity with services or poor communication between caregivers.
I found after going through a few of these cases, I would begin skimming through many details and started becoming desensitised to all this information. It was surprising to find myself just writing down things as if these were just numbers and facts instead of someone’s life. I kept going back and forth with myself thinking I should be looking into these with much more empathy like I had with the first few I had done. This was challenging to do as it was emotionally draining to be reading report and after report especially if emotionally involving myself in each of them.
I learnt to somehow switch off some of my emotions in some parts of the cases otherwise I just could not get the work done as I would have distracted myself with a service users life story when I was simply there to help improve care. I was not aware I had the ability to close off part of my emotionality and it was interesting but also scary to find I could do it so quickly without even thinking about it.
I was working with someone else on all these cases and the way both of our communication changed from the beginning to about halfway through the cases was so interesting. Both of us had similarly become less overwhelmed to all this information and began just noting down the important facts that was beneficial to our work as it made us more efficient. On the other hand, we were both sat there thinking about why we had changed and what it meant. We found ourselves slightly perturbed at how we could be so nonchalant about these cases.
I believe I am a very empathetic and sympathetic person and during this time I definitely felt as if I was, but it was interesting to witness another side of me that I didn’t know I had. The ability to switch off to save myself unnecessary emotion. I had heard about it, but it wasn’t until this moment that I truly used this ability, recognised myself using it and thought critically about myself doing it. It was interesting to see this side of me but it was somehow both haunting and soothing that I had this capability.
