Between 2006 and 2008, I had a stroke of bad luck and ended up in Oulu University Hospital a number of times. No one would claim that hospital visits are free from stress. On the contrary, my stress levels rose faster and faster while the clock on the waiting room wall seemed to tick slower and slower. We waited and waited and waited for a doctor, a technician, a nurse . . . or just for a simple piece of paper with medical instructions.
Not knowing what’s happening makes people feel insecure and panicky so obviously being able to ask, and being told, what’s going on is vital to making any stay at hospital tolerable. Everybody who’s been in hospital and been questioned by a healthcare worker, lying horizontally in an uncomfortable bed, with a question as simple as “what are you going to do next?” knows that the ability to communicate quickly disappears between the smoothly ironed bed sheets. I don’t expect doctors to be chatty, but I do think I have the right to expect genuine information and comfort from the nursing staff. 
Unfortunately, asking for information, even for the length of my stay at Oulu Hospital, or the outcome of a blood test, became extremely stressful. I became gradually convinced that this could have been avoided, had the staff listened more. Not only my stress levels, but those of friends and family sky-rocketed as well. The harder I tried to be sensitive to the nurse’s rigid work schedule, the more frustrated I felt. After a week, I was afraid that my strange Finnish accent was scaring the nurses away. Instead of worrying about the health issues, I spent most of the time trying to calm down. I had expected that, as a nurse myself, communication would be comfortable and straightforward. Instead I found myself hearing about important medical turns – a ruptured appendix, an unplanned x-ray – five days after the event, and not even from a doctor. The nurses presented them in cold and clinical terms without any bedside manner. How can one give care, encouragement and support to the sick without an emotional connection? If this is cultural, it’s not about the difference between one nationality and another. You could make a case for saying that services cater best for the average resident, who is a Finn, and that an influx of patients from other cultures will shake the established practice, even in a hospital. But I firmly believe that , irrespective of language or general upbringing, a nurse must be aware of a patient as an individual with specific beliefs, education, and values – that is, if they want to design a successful nursing plan. In 2006, after a car accident I was, in state of shock waiting for admittance to the emergency, when a nurse came to carry out the first checks: blood pressure, pulse and eye reflexes. Anxious I asked her if I could contact my family and inform them of my whereabouts. She looked away from me and answered in distant tone that everybody in Oulu knows where local ambulances deliver the injured. It wasn’t necessary to inform “people” about that. With trembling voice and tears in my eyes I told her that my family wasn’t from here. But she walked away from the ambulance and left me literally powerless behind. One hears a lot of talk from Oulu health professionals – in magazines and newspapers – about well-being, low stress levels and shortened recovery times. But how can you provide good healthcare without emotionally connecting with the patient? This is isn’t ‘culture shock.’ It’s a shock at nursing care practice that falls way below nursing standards.
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