Volunteer at UW Medical Center

Title: UWMC Escort Volunteer
Hours: 3 hrs
Volunteer Manager: Cynnie Foss
Contact: (206)588-4218

Figure 1. My volunteer ID

The UW Medical Center Volunteer Services Department sponsored this team. The goals are to provide exceptional patient and family-centered care in an environment of education and innovation.
My duties include helping the nurses to deliver patients, assisting the patients’ family members, collecting and inspecting wheelchairs, and delivering specimens to assigned departments.

In my experience of volunteering at UWMC, I realized how significant the medical staff for patients. No matter going to the hospital or living in the hospital for a long time, patients are anxious and more clinging. They long for people's help and care because they are worried about their health, high medical payment, and other personal concerns. Before I started volunteering, I thought my job is just doing some unimportant tasks -- as a "deliver". The longer I stayed, the more I learned about my role in this team. We don't just deliver whatever, sometimes by communicating with the patients when transferring them from one place to another can make them feel better before attending their appointments. This kind of support seems negligible; however, this little thing actually is more helpful to calm a patient down and/or let them feel relaxed before seeing the doctor. The medical field is a part of the service industry. A comfortable and qualified medical environment can prosper our community health care centers. Biology is closely related to chemistry, sociology, ecology, sociology, and many more. Our community is made up of different populations, which consist of different organisms. And go further down the list, we are formed by little particles. Our society is made up of various communities, and this is what we are striving to make it a better world. Learning science is not the only thing in biology, we get to understand what does the society needs and how can we change our lives. By volunteering at UWMC, I realized how important communication skills for medical staff. We have to use the right and easy-to-understand words to talk to the patients, which requires cultures awareness and professional medical backgrounds.

Figure 2. Me while at work with my volunteer attire

The 4 questions that I have are as below:
(1) Since the requirement of medical care is very high not only in the US but also around the world, is it possible for the government or the hospitals to improve the financial assistance for those people who need more help with their medical coverage?
(2) Synthetic biology seems to play a more and more important role in our medical field. Regardless of how dramatically those customized treatments this technology brought us, is there any side effect or downside might occur?
(3) Nowadays, more and more students choose to attend the medical field; however, research shows that 90% of these students don't have a good reason to pursue their careers -- they want to make tons of money. Based on this, I am wondering if we need to have a morality test as well for all the people who are tending to work in the medical field?
(4) As I work in the medical center, I noticed how difficult it is to understand or explain all the medical words, especially for non-native speakers. The majority of our hospitals just have English signs and sometimes the patients cannot even read them. I personally think multilingual signs in the hospitals can make a big impact sometimes, like reducing the possibilities of death due to these slight problems. Do we need some updates in the hospitals such as making it more international to improve the medical cares in America?