Young healthcare workers need to show more empathy, therapist says

Greg Noack has seen the healthcare sector at work from both sides.

He received months of rehabilitation after suffering a brain injury in a vicious attack in 1996 and for the last 20 years has delivered care to patients as a rehabilitation therapist in Toronto.

These days, Noack, a Sault native, doesn’t like all that he sees in how care is delivered to patients right across the healthcare board.

He has recently published a book entitled Collateral Damage: When Caregivers No Longer Care, sharing his feelings on what he perceives to be a lack of empathy for patients and the need for patients and family members to stick up for themselves in the face of that coldness.

“The book basically shows that the state of health care is not good, especially in comparison to the care I received and looking at what it has evolved into in my 20 plus years of working in healthcare,” Noack said, speaking to SooToday from Toronto.

Noack agrees that there needs to be more staff hired right across the healthcare system but that there also must be more empathy toward patients among younger clinical staff.

“It’s a different generation of workers,” Noack said.

“I don’t want to criticize the millennial mindset but when I had rehab myself all my therapists were in their 50s and they really personalized my care and really tended to me. Now, I’m twice the age of many of the clinicians I work with and there’s just a different mindset. There’s no personalization of care. It’s just ‘get the job done and move on to the next patient.’”

“I don’t want to paint everyone with the same brush. I work with a lot of amazing people too but I just find that number may be diminishing now as I get older and staff get younger.”

After leaving the Sault to work in western Canada, Noack was attacked by a gang after coming off a night shift in Victoria, BC in November 1996.

Suffering from a brain injury, he was unconscious for 15 days and had to regain the use of his legs and left arm.

After months of rehab, Noack received further care from his mother in southern Ontario.

Inspired by the level of care he received in hospital, Noack returned to his hometown to study in Sault College’s Occupational Therapist Assistant and Physiotherapy Assistant program.

He has worked as a rehabilitation therapist with Toronto’s University Health Network for the last two decades.

Noack shared his story with SooToday in a 2018 interview.    

After being attacked, he received two months of inpatient therapy and seven months of outpatient therapy.

“That’s unheard of nowadays,” Noack said.

“It’s so quick now. We turn people over and they don’t get the resources I had. It’s striking how that happened.”

Noack credits the involvement of his mother Dianne Quinn as a huge factor in his own recovery. 

“My biggest personal concern is for those who don’t have a mother like me, an advocate or support group like I was blessed with and the question becomes: ‘Who speaks for them?’” If I hadn’t had my mother 26 years ago — when things were good — I wouldn’t be here today. I would definitely be in trouble if I was in today’s healthcare.”

“If we don’t do a good job in rehab, it’s a trickle down effect. It affects a patient’s life after rehab in long term care or at home and puts a strain on their caregivers. If we don’t care here at rehab it results in collateral damage.”

Noack said care for his father — the Sault’s Lennox Noack, who died of cancer in 2013 — could have been better.

Noack’s book is dedicated to his father.

“I didn’t like some of the stuff my dad experienced at hospital," he said. "The things I talk about in my book are everywhere. I’m making waves for him. I want that book to say: ‘Okay people, if you see something going wrong speak up because that’s your loved one.’ I’m still talking about that nine years later but that’s the impact that my father’s care level had on me.”

To ensure patients get the quality of care they need, Noack urges them to speak up.

“I want to empower those who require health care to speak up. They have to speak up to get what they should be receiving. The back of my book has a checklist of things they should be getting. If the patients just rip that out of my book I’d be happy.”

“In the book I want to speak up for those who can’t speak.”

Collateral Damage: When Caregivers No Longer Care is available for sale online.