Meet Sam

Sam is a PCT who has been working in dialysis for 6 years. Sam often thinks the patients he takes care of don’t try very hard to understand their disease and they certainly don’t seem to care about themselves. When Sam’s patients arrive for a treatment he checks off the boxes on the admission sheet and doesn’t ask any extra questions. He doesn’t connect very well with his patients and often has disagreements with them. Sam’s demeanor with his patients comes across to most people as uncaring.

Sam tries his best to keep a low profile, so he rarely interacts with the other staff in his clinic. He just learned that the clinic is required to have a dietitian and a social worker, but he is still unclear about what each of them does. Sam has never spoken with any of the physicians in the clinic. He assumes his job is to set up the machine and answer alarms. If a patient has a question, they rarely ask Sam; he always tells them to ask the nurse.

Sam gets easily frustrated with his job (he doesn’t think he is paid enough and dislikes some of his co-workers), and he complains out loud to his co-workers and the patients about the poor working conditions. Sam doesn’t really understand the impact that issues like diabetes, depression, and poverty have on his patients and tends to think all his patients pretty much look and act the same. Sam is always looking for new jobs that pay better and are not so routine and boring as being a PCT. Sam doesn’t understand why patients complain about him because he feels like he is doing a good job most of the time.