If a patient is having trouble getting along with staff in the hospital I sometimes take the time to teach them how to get the best care possible in the hospital. 1/
First you get to know the names of all the people taking care of you. 2/
Understand while they are here doing their job and treat you with courtesy and respect they are also human beings who appreciate being treated with courtesy and respect. 3/
Simple manners go a long way. Please and thank you.
“Good morning” and “good afternoon.”
Ask basic questions that suggest know know there is a human being in that uniform. “How are you today?” 4/
You can get to know this person a little bit.
Do they have a pet?
A family?
Plans for holidays?
Normal stuff you use to connect with a stranger.
Safe topics for polite company. 5/
When you make more work for someone, even through no fault of your own, it’s kindly to apologize.
“Sorry for making a mess.” 6/
Try to notice when your caregivers are having a bad day. We all have them. Try to keep in mind it’s not about you. Some people are working through a harder day than you are having. 7/
Some people say I should try to teach patients good manners.
I disagree. Learning how to get good care can make the experience of being sick much more pleasant for a patient. 8/
If you’ve read this far, I commend you.
Now for the lesson.
These are the same rules I teach residents to interact with nurses, therapists, and the rest of the staff at the hospital.
Read through them again. This is how you become a doctor that works well in a hospital. 9/
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Somewhere in the last few months I unfollowed or blocked the lynchpin of social media crazy and now they’ve all gone away.
The antivaxxers, flat earth, fluoride is poison, 5G, COVID’s a hoax. All of them. Gone. All I see day after day is normal, logical, scientific opinions.
I wish I knew how I closed the wormhole to Tinfoil Hatland. It’s become so pleasant here where reliable people depend on other reliable people to render reliable opinions.
Alternatively, maybe I silence the people who are full on 🍌🍌🍌 so fast and so effortlessly that I just keep screening them right out of my sphere of attention. 🤔🤔🤔
I recently had a house staff teaching team and as an experiment we added a “problem” onto the end of each patient’s problem list called:
Bias.
[A thread]
With humility, I admit I Didn’t think this project would bear as much fruit as it did.
After all the problems of ACUTE HYPOXEMIC RESPIRATORY INSUFFICIENCY and SIRS, I would ask the team to consider how the patient’s race, gender, orientation, nationality, ethnicity, language, socioeconomic status, addiction, etc. was affecting their care past or present.