Last month, I went to the hospital in downtown Shanghai to see my grandpa. Before he was admitted to the hospital, he had been living on his isolated farm and seldom going out. We chatted for a while and he told me his amazing experience with the digital tools in the hospital: At the entrance to the outpatient apartment stand machines that help him with triage and registration; on the wall of the waiting room hung screens that display the order of the patients; in the consulting room are various of electrical appliances that are integral to the diagnosis. He was astonished at the efficiency of the electronic devices. When I was about to leave, he even jokingly suggested that I should change my major because sooner or later robots would replace nurses.
This is a quite common claim. At first glance, the alarming fact that digital tools are overwhelmingly efficient and precise might lead the public to conclude that the healthcare industry no longer needs manual labor. According to the founding executive editor of Wired Kelvin Kelly, today's man-made products or manual services provide a sense of uniqueness, but little else. What's more, the irregularities human introduced should be corrected when dealing with people's lives. As a general trend, the infallible automation technology "will touch all jobs." (300-306) Whereas Kelly provides ample evidence about robots' migration into all fields of work, the complexity of medical care convinces me that technology should never be so important that it completely replaces the human element.
One feature of the healthcare service is that it copes with patients' psychological traumas as well as physical injuries. Since patients may have a variety of emotional difficulties, from slight fret to severe depression, during the treatment, healthcare workers need to comfort and soothe their clients. That's why even nursing students, like me, have to take at least one psychology course to earn their degrees...