Junior Doctor here on internal medicine rotation.
I was in a very busy ED on nights this week and maybe it was just the lack of sleep but found myself getting really irritated by the following things:
– Patient comes in and is really unwell, I tell patient she has to stay in and then the husband (and to a degree the patient also) get really annoyed that I'm telling them she has to stay in for IV antibiotics, blood transfusion etc and it's in her best interest she does this. Similar scenario with a few patients over the set of nights. I don't understand, if you think you are sick enough to come into hospital, there is a chance we might want to keep you in. Why are patients shocked when we tell them this? It's like they expect us to magically fix them in 5 mins and send them home.
– Conversely it's the patients that are absolutely fine and can be sent home with some advice of self care who scream at me that they want to be admitted.
-When asking for a drug history. PATIENT: "I take the little yellow pill in the morning",
ME: do you know what this is called? Do you have a list of your medications with you?PATIENT: "No, don't you know what the little yellow pill is call? You should know you're a doctor."ME: :/
It would just be common sense to me that if you have a million things wrong and take a ton of pills you might bring a copy of you drug history in with you to the hospital. Especially patients who have a spouse or someone with them to help with that when coming into hospital.
– Patients lying to me on direct questioning when I know they have a history of drug use etc.
What are your patient pet peeves, how have you worked through them? I'm not normally this aggy about patients but finding myself particularly irritable and burned out this week.
Edit: It annoys me how when a patient makes a complaint early on, even if it is completely unfounded, then the management go out of their way to go way above and beyond to make sure they don't complain again. We end up spending so much time appeasing the patient and their family, and to be honest I think the other patients suffer because we are spending unequal time with this one patient. I feel like at the end of the day if they are going to complain then they are going to complain, can't stop them. I once had to tell a family member that I couldn't talk to him again as he demanded 3 updates a day with the doctors. I have to kindly and politely explain that by talking to him for 15 mins 3 times a day, my time was being taken away from the medical care of his father and the other patients on the ward. I could be spending my time, ordering and interpreting tests, diagnosing managing etc, instead of spending over an hour talking with him. I think he finally understood but kept asking me for multiple updates so had to reiterate again the message the next day. Very frustrating.
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