Life’s a funny balance. That’s particularly true with healthcare organizations that are trying to ensure their patients are prepped properly for surgery. Healthcare organizations want to make sure their patients are prepped and ready for the surgery or it throws off their schedules. Given many of the surgery back logs out there, it’s painful to not fill an open surgery slot with a patient. Plus, it can cause a ripple of delays that are a big problem.
On the other hand, this fear causes many of the communications with patients to feel like they’re communicating with a child and lack trust and respect. Like I said, it’s a fine line we walk since some patients need that kind of hand holding to ensure they do what’s needed. Plus, we have to remember that often the patient needs the surgery on that date and a delay is bad for the patient’s health too.
This pre-operative email from a patient to their doctor that was shared by Dr. Servais illustrates the point really well.
This remains my favorite pre-operative email I’ve received from a patient..😁#tssmn #medtwitter pic.twitter.com/RVxBZRXDlB
— Elliot Servais, MD, FACS (@ElliotServaisMD) December 20, 2021
Obviously, this hits on a lot of stereotypes, but isn’t that kind of the point? How many stereotypes do healthcare organizations apply to patients? Is there a way to communicate the right thing in a way that accomplishes the goal of patients being ready for surgeries without hitting those stereotypes?
Turns out this is a challenge for many chronic patients as well. I recently saw on Twitter a chronic patient talking about how a doctor who studies their chronic condition for 1 week or even 1 day in med school shouldn’t assume they know so much more than the patient who had lived with the disease for 20 years. Another example of the challenging balance we face in healthcare.
At the end of the day, this is really a question of respect for each other. And yes, it goes both ways. Patients should respect and trust doctors and doctors should respect and trust patients. However, much of our communication in healthcare doesn’t accomplish this goal. The letter above should be inspiration for us all to think about how what we communicate impacts care. Plus, as we automate many of these communications using technology, this is going to literally be hard wired into the system.
