Healthcare professionals sometimes struggle to demonstrate the manual dexterity skills required to complete clinical procedures effectively. This can happen due to them having few or no healthy hobbies.
The situation can be quite concerning because even the slightest wrong movement or misjudgment can be a matter of life and death for a patient.
According to experts, the lack of fine motor skills among healthcare professionals may directly result from them not being exposed to classes that need practical craft skills. Also, the current lot of doctors, nurses, and practitioners are too committed to their smartphones and other tech devices, leaving them with little time to pursue hobbies that can fine-tune their motor skills.
This is not to say that technology is evil! Digitization of data, technological advancements, and automation are significantly reshaping the healthcare industry for the better. In fact, acquiring healthcare-related education has also become easier for aspiring and existing professionals to skill-up and expand their roles within the industry. For instance, nurses who aspire to progress in their careers can easily enroll in online BSN to MSN programs to gain more knowledge. These degrees and courses allow professionals to learn more while simultaneously gathering relevant clinical experience.
However, whatever the reason is, many veterans of the medical community suggest one thing: indulging in a healthy hobby. By getting involved in repetitive physical tasks, healthcare professionals can fine-tune their motor skills, making them more intuitive.
Without further delay, let’s discuss some healthy hobbies that healthcare professionals (like you) may undertake.
1. Cookie decoration with a piping bag
You’ll need precision and steady hands to pipette materials. Often, these materials are compounds or cells that are either in a limited supply from a sample collected from a patient or cost a lot. By decorating cookies with icing, you’ll increase your precision.
This is usually done after the border is outlined on a gingerbread cookie. Then, you use liquid icing to fill the center and trace intricate patterns. To satisfy your knack for creativity, you can look up icing patterns on YouTube while you’re at it.
This hobby can be a tasty and practical way of improving your precision in the healthcare facility. If you want to challenge yourself a little more, build a structure, for example, a gingerbread house. This will help you practice balance, delicate touch, and of course, engineering. Talk about a wholesomely delicious learning experience!
2. Artistic activities
Some artistic activities can improve your motor skills. These include woodcarving, sculpting, and painting. However, they can also improve your mental health. According to a study, drawn words can enhance memory recall by integrating motor, semantic, and visual aspects of the memory trace path. If you’re a physician who many patients routinely visit, this hobby will help you a lot with keeping track of patients’ medical histories.
Pursuing a creative art-related hobby can also help to reduce cortisol levels in the blood. If you have an interest in mentalism secrets you can invest your valuable time to learn mentalism by signing up easily at online sources. This drastically reduces stress levels and helps to prevent work-related burnout. Less-stressed healthcare professionals are less likely to make bad judgments that can affect a patient’s health while on call.
3. Playing the strings
Playing the strings will relieve your stress.
If you become part of the orchestra, you’ll be doing yourself a favor – a favor of getting great therapy.
4. Meditation
There are numerous benefits of mindfulness. In fact, many healthcare experts suggest meditation and yoga as part of adjuvant care while treating various conditions including cardiovascular disease, obesity, and anxiety. However, these benefits do not end at your patients.
As a healthcare professional, you have to combat consistent stressors both in and out of the hospital. However, stress and anxiety will harm your clinical judgment and ability to perform correctly while on call. Regular meditation can help you achieve psychological balance. Plus, it can ‘restart’ your mind and improve your memory. Meditation also helps to enhance neural connections and muscular flexibility leading to greater agility and strength.
The best part is that you don’t necessarily have to distance yourself from your workplace to partake in this healthy hobby. Get a yoga mat and takeout a few minutes for yourself from your schedule, and you’re all set. As a healthcare professional, it is essential to practice what you preach – and what better way to do that than by meditating regularly?
Read More: How to Develop a Healthy Daily Routine in Recovery
5. Crocheting or knitting
If you’re struggling with clinical tasks such as stitching sutures, catheterization, or phlebotomy, picking a pair of knitting needles and ball of yarn can help you out!
The fiber arts can significantly help you enhance your manual dexterity, which will make a profound difference in your clinical performance. This is because the underlying principle while stitching a cut or knot is the same – a change in grip or tension can substantially alter the outcome. Plus, it offers a chance to threading small materials (for example, embroidery floss) using needles.
By crocheting or knitting, you’ll acquire muscle memory, which will be helpful when you’ll be looking to imprint a novel mechanical skill. To get started, visit YouTube or visit a local specialty craft store. Besides all of this, crocheting or knitting will help you make gifts like sweaters, blankets, scarves, hats, etc., for your family, friends, or even someone special at work! Cute, no?
6. Writing
When you’re in the hospital, you spend a good portion of your time among patients and technology. A lot of the written tasks include writing admission notes, discharge summaries, and clinical reports on the status of patients’ health. Of course, you wouldn’t want to write anything after you leave work, but don’t underestimate the power of writing as an extracurricular activity.
Writing can include anything from journalism to journaling. Suppose you are writing blog posts or journal articles. In that case, you’ll have to focus on attention to detail, analysis, research, and data collection. When evaluating your patients, you use all of these skills.
Another path to stress relief is narrative medicine, which is a famous form of creative nonfiction. In essence, the common themes are communications with patients in the workplace and emotional and challenging personal experiences. When writing about these experiences, you’ll process events and productively acquire clarity. You demonstrate empathy for the patients, for yourself, and everyone involved.
But don’t forget, your writing skill will equally benefit your career. For example, you may pursue professional options like practice materials, textbooks, and journal articles. Irrespective of what you write, you’ll be strengthening your written communication skills with every piece.
Conclusion
Typically, the idea of maintaining a work-life balance is relatively challenging especially in careers that are both physically and mentally demanding. However, it’s still recommended that you invest in yourself when you’re not at work. It will contribute to your professional development. By spending your free time in a fulfilling, rich way, you’ll develop into more comprehensive and thoughtful healthcare professional. Plus, trying out these hobbies may assist you in moving into that upgraded version of yourself!
