Few things are more stressful than being an emergency medical care provider, yet some people manage to make their job even more difficult than it already is.

An accident & emergency department worker, redditor ‘Disastrous_Encounter’, recently discussed the time they encountered someone who made their job needlessly difficult. There was a patient who came in with a sprained ankle, but that didn’t stop her from being rude to the staff and disparaging of the treatment she was getting, consequently resulting in her getting petty revenge, too.

Scroll down to find the full story below, where you will also find Bored Panda’s interview with the user ‘Disastrous_Encounter’, who was kind enough to answer a few of our questions.

Being a healthcare professional is a challenging job as it is

Image credits: Mikhail Nilov / pexels (not the actual photo)

But some people, like the patient in this story, can make it even more difficult

Image credits: MART PRODUCTION / pexels (not the actual photo)

Image credits: Disastrous_Encounter

Troublesome patients are unfortunately not that uncommon

Being a healthcare worker is far from easy, yet thousands of new professionals enter the workforce every year. In the UK, for instance, where the OP’s story took place, the number of such professionals has been increasing for more than a decade, Statista reports (with one drop in numbers during the Covid period in 2021).

According to said source, there were approximately 1.5 million health professionals employed in the United Kingdom in 2020. (Globally, there were reportedly more than 65 million of them working in the field in the same year.)

In a recent interview with Bored Panda, the OP shared that they now work on the other side of the world from where their story happened back in the early ‘90s. “The rules around NHS billing for tourists may well have changed by now,” they said.

The redditor recalled that what got on their nerves the most was the patient’s arrogance and how rude she was to the nurses. “She complained about the wait, which was due to someone else being really sick, while she could wait with no ill effect. She implied we were incompetent for not dealing with her quickly as was her ‘right’ (when she actually had few).”

The OP emphasized that the patient was a particularly annoying example of a type they had dealt with before. “Most of the time we let it slide. That time I had the tools for petty revenge.”

Image credits: MART PRODUCTION / pexels (not the actual photo)

Rude patients are “fuel for burnout”, the OP says

“ED [emergency department] and A&E [accident & emergency] staff meet rude and aggressive people very regularly. Often drunk and aggressive, too,” the redditor continued, pointing out that troublesome patients are not that rare of an occurrence. “I’m now fortunate that I do something more specialized, so people tend to realize they ought to show some normal courtesy by the time I see them.”

The OP added that rude and negative people make the job harder. “Placating them sufficiently so they don’t cause even more problems is a time sink and slows things down for everyone around them. It’s also demoralizing to know that you’ve done things right, but for some it is never good enough. That’s fuel for burnout.”

Experiencing burnout is, unfortunately, an unsurprising but upsetting reality of people who spend countless hours studying and working hard so they can help those in need. Needless to say, the recent pandemic hasn’t made things any easier for the professionals in the field, either.

A study conducted by the Qatar Foundation and the World Innovation Summit for Health (WISH) found that, during the pandemic, burnout affected somewhere between 41-52% of healthcare workers. “The pressure isn’t new, but COVID-19 has brought into sharp focus the need for better care for those who care for us,” Sultana Afdhal, Chief Executive Officer of WISH, emphasized.

The least we can do to take better care of those who care for us is being respectful and kind to the healthcare workers that look after us. And if that is not enough for someone to change their rude behavior, having to pay for something that would have been free otherwise might do the trick.

Image credits: Cedric Fauntleroy / pexels (not the actual photo)

The OP provided fellow redditors with more details

People shared their thoughts and discussed similar experiences in the comments

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