It's really a sad incident: an old man was suddenly caught by heart attack and he was taken to the Caritas Hopsital immediately by his son. Instead of driving him to the Accident and Emergency Department, his son took him to the Caritas Medical centre next to the main medical block. He went into the centre to call for help. The receptionist there, rather than summoning assistance for the desperate son, told him to dial 999 by himself. A doctor passed by at this moment. In sight of the collapsed old man, he called the emergency department for help. At the same time he attempted to resuscitate the old man. The old man was flied to emergency room minutes later. But he was pronounced dead shortly after being dashed to the emergency room.
I wonder why when one recognizes that a man is dying metres away, there can still be alternative response beside trying one's very best to help immediately. This is definitely common sense. The receptionist's reaction, from a psychoanalytical point of view, can be explained in three ways. One is he was not psychollogically prepared for such rare accidents. But this is rather unconvincing as common sense works best at time of emergency and the receptionist should have been trained to handle emergency situations like this. The second possible reason is the receptionist has a couldn't-care-less attitude.
The third explanation is the receptionist was sober at that time. He also had the intention to help. But he was (perhaps still is) hesitating whether he should play out of the guideline which doesn't provide any info on how to deal with such emergency cases. What a shame. We are flexible creatures, both physically and mentally. We are not robots which act on programmes designed by someone else. Guidelines are useful in telling one the about the general info of an organization and how they are supposed to behave. They are of little use for handling emergency. As not many can remain calm at emergency. it's impossible that one can recall relevent guidelines, if there is any. in seconds. So this is why we say reflexes conditioned for dealing with emergency and flexibility are more important. Accidents can happen anywhere. There can never be a complete set of guidelines covering every possible case.


