I was going to amb this 76 yo pt, but recently he has been complaining of (L) calf pain. So the Dr. have requested for a scan to rule out any DVT. So i checked with the nursing staff and she wasn't sure of the results. I went to page the registra in charge. No reply. I page again 2 minutes later.Waited...and waited.... for another 5 miunutes, no reply. I left the phone and went to treat my other patients. I went back after treating another patient and paged again. No response. And then again. No response. Thought i'd paged one more time (for good luck). He replied!! Woohoo!
I introduced myself and asked about the patient. He went ballistic on the phone saying that i don't have to page him 3 times (well the 3rd time worked :p )then i went on to explain to him that i paged him earlier and i got no response. At this time he was even more angry that i have in total paged him 5 times. He said that he replied my earlier page straight away (which he didn't). He was really quite rude and said he hadn't look at the results and will do when he's free. Fair enough i thought. And then i said, if he could let me know that will be great, because i'd like to get him up walking after 3 days of not walking. He rudely replied "i make the calls here, not you!" At this point, i realised there was no point talking further. I said thank you and hang up.
Some doctors can be quite rude and abrupt sometimes. This is not the first time i've had difficulties with doctors. They often invade halfway into your treatment and just talk to the patient you're treating without acknowledging or apologising.
I spoke to my supervisor and he said, if next time the registra doesn't reply a page, try the resident, or even a doctor from another team may know. But he said doctors can sometimes be quite rude, especially when they're under a lot of stress with many patients. Next time i will try the approach.
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2 comments:
Interesting post kenny, I havent had any issues with Dr.s being rude, but i have felt alot of caution when paging someone, especially with the status of student. Its difficult to know when it is appropriate to page someone who is not answering and how much you should persevere in paging them. The heirachy that we encounter in the hospital system is sometimes difficult to deal with. Hopefully with experience these interactions will be easier.
Good topic to discuss Kenny
I guess you have to understand that everyone gets busy sometimes. On my recent clinic they had a good paging system with docters. When sending a land page you would put on the end if it was urgent, semi urgent or just a queary.
Urgent pages were arranged to be answered within 5 mins by the docs, 5-15 mins for semi urgent and half an hour for the non urgent ones. Therefore we could classify our page when we sent it and that meant less hanging around phones waiting for pages and more time treating patients.
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