Andrew Gabriel believes a haircut can change your mood and ultimately your future.
A haircut offered by someone in Nutrition Services? Going center stage as a musician from your hospital bed? Sometimes caregivers get creative as they empathize with their patients and find new and effective ways to meet their needs. Here are two examples from LDS Hospital:
Would you like a trim with your fries?
Andrew Gabriel works in Nutrition Services and gets to know some of the patients as he delivers their meals. He previously had his own successful business as a barber who traveled to people’s homes for haircuts, so when he met a patient in need of a hair and beard trim recently, he offered to come back and give him one after he got off his shift.
Andrew says the man was grateful for the offer and Andrew spent an hour giving him a free haircut.
“The next day when I came back to visit, he was out of his bed and in his home clothes, and he was wearing a sweater and reading a book,” Andrew says. He thinks the trim and cut made the patient feel better about himself. It’s not the first time he’s given someone a haircut on his own time at the hospital.
Emily Beckenridge, RN, found a way to use music to help a patient recovering in LDS Hospital.
He says he gave a haircut to another patient and the next day the patient told him his good cell count had gone up and the patient credited the haircut, calling it a “healing thing for him.” Andrew believes a good haircut can have a positive effect on you.
“I feel like a haircut can change your mood and ultimately your future,” he says.
The LDS Hospital Administrative Council heard about Andrew’s good deeds and wrote him a letter. It says that since his first week the administrative team has noticed how “personable and friendly” he is.
“You have an incredible ability to get to know, connect, and communicate with people,” the letter reads. “Those skills lend well to being able to understand what is most important to our patients…Thank you for being genuine and service oriented to create an exceptional experience for our patients and caregivers.”
Taylor Webb, RN, helped Emily pull off her plan.
Center stage in a hospital bed
A patient who’d had a difficult stay with a lot of unexpected things that had come up, was due to have some bandages changed. Emily Breckenridge, RN, was worried this would prove a painful thing for the patient so she started thinking of how she could make the experience more tolerable.
Emily drafted a nurse apprentice, Melanie Howell, RN, and the charge nurse that night, Taylor Web, RN, to help her pull off her plan after they’d taken care of their other patients. She wanted them to have the time to give this patient some extra attention.
“Over the course of working with her, we’d found she really responded well to music; it really boosted her spirits,” Emily says. “We played some music she liked. She was in her bed and she was moving her arms and she was playing instruments. She was laughing and she had a really good time. And I think everybody else in the room had a really good time as well.”
Melanie Howell, RN, ended up joining in a musical jam session in a patient's room.
While all this was happening and the woman was distracted by Melanie—who was playing along with her, and even dancing a little bit—Emily and Taylor changed the dressings on some wounds on the woman’s backside.
“It was fun to get to know her,” Emily says. “I think she had a good night. She was happy and she was having fun. It was really the first night she’d talked to us. And we were getting to know her more as a friend and not as a patient.”
“When our caregivers take time to see our patients as fellow humans with their own hopes and fears, they can be the oxygen our patients need to turn hope into healing and relieve many fears,” says Shelley Egley, system director of patient advocacy. “These caregivers truly demonstrated the magic of helping these patients heal.”