While on my paediatric placement I treated a patient from Malaysia. She had quite severe developmental delay and a mental disability. She was visiting Perth for a week long intensive physiotherapy treatment.
After every session her mom would insist that she gave me a kiss and a hug to say thank you. This is a perfectly appropriate practice between friends, but in a proffesional manner I wasn't quite sure. I did not want to hurt my patients feelings by not doing it, but at the same time I began to feel uncomfortable.
I was only treating this patient for a very short time, so I decided to put my feelings aside and give her a hug after every session. In the long run I feel that this was the right decision to make. It created a good bond between myself and the patient and allowed her to trust me. Every situation is different, and in the future I might not allow this again, but in this situation it was the right thing to do.
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