When I first saw the movie Wit in my Health care in Literature class, I remember feeling a great deal of empathy towards the client’s crisis yet conflicted due to the fact that I am a representative of the health care field. The movie shows a much skewed angle as a recipient of health care services. Notably the narrator comes off as snobby and the health care providers are largely portrayed as incompetent or redundant in order to emphasize the author’s theme of health care insensitivity. The largest take away from the movie is that there is a great gap between the culture of a health care provider and a health care client. I have never heard of anyone really discuss this theme prior – on our scope of education we frequently talk about knowledge deficit on the patient’s end and a need to be culturally sensitive on the end of the health care provider. However, don’t we as health care providers have our own culture on which we need to educate our clients? I feel like at many times it would have been more appropriate to explain to the client why some redundant questions always will be asked by any health care provider – why some students will come off as incompetent when performing an examination.

As health care providers our competency is highly scrutinized by our clients and it is not so in most professions. On the opposite spectrum, we lose sensitivity to our clients in their vast multitudes. Our first patient and our first case fades as the clients are populated in their vast multitudes and are less defined by themselves but more by the reasons of their pathologies and their bed numbers. After seeing this movie again I am reminded that there needs to be a bridge built over this great gap between cultures of the health care clients and health care providers. As nurses we are often the ones finding themselves filling that gap, however even more so, we must not bear this burden alone but instead seek to create a permanent progress. As we advance towards a more involved health care with greater education available to the clients I believe we would benefit from being more empathetic towards the clients and letting them into our own complex world of health care and keep the lines of communication open.