The other day when I was attending to an old lady, this is somewhere in Naxal, in a small clinic for patients who seek medical attention for free. I was taking her history as usual. Later on, when a board certified doctor examined her and gave her medications for the illness, she left the clinic as usual but I was curious to know about how she felt about the interaction with the doctor.
So in the next subsequent minutes, I exchanged a few words of reassurance to her and she just smiled and gave me blessing to become a better doctor in the future. The story ends there but then I started to realize that reassuring a patient is very essential from the treatment perspective.
So in the next few hours, I reassured the next ten patients who were in the list to get diagnosed and even when the senior doctor already gave them a quick reassurance, they liked the way I tried to explain the same fact again, this time taking more of their time and mine to do so. In my quest to find the solution between the endless distance between doctors and patients, I have come to analyze patients as well. The classification is as follows:
The “Grumpy kind”: These people don’t publicly share their dislike for the way the doctor’s handled them. They go home, complain about how the doctor handled his/her case. These people are opportunistic when it comes to expressing their dislike towards doctors.
The” Violent kind”: Now, we have had heard stories about doctors getting beaten by patients. But let’s take a look at what I have to say about this: Doctor’s are responsible citizens who aim to protect and care for the sick and needy. Mistakes are not preventable. There are ways of handling situations where mistakes are unacceptable but violence is not one of them. I will have to say that patients like these are idiotic in nature. Either they don’t know terms like ” sue ” and ” law” or its the natural spontaneity of these people to act in the way that they just did.
The “I don’t believe in doctor’s kind”: These people believe in supernatural power of healing and have absolute no intention of visiting the doctor at any cost. Either coming to the doctor is the last resort or things seem unfavorable in the supernatural department.
If you are a patient and if you want satisfaction during a visit to the doctors clinic, write to healthnepal11(dot)gmail. Share us your stories and help us make better doctors for the future. Health Nepal Foundation is keen to decrease the gap between the patients and doctors and we want to improve the health care system in Nepal.