Bedside Manner Blog

A resident approached an elderly man on a gurney in the E.R. Resident: “Do you know who I am?” Old Guy: “Sure, you’re the doctor, but I don’t know your name.” Resident: “So what brought you to the E.R.?” Old Guy: “An ambulance.” ____ Branding is the commercial concept of developing a recognizable reputation that is marketable and has value in terms of goodwill. Professional practice incorporates the same concepts. Doctors, hospitals, and clinics all value their reputation and branding offers increased patien ...

Doctors at a large hospital have gone on strike. Hospital officials say they will find out what the doctors’ demands are as soon as they can get a pharmacist to go read the picket signs! ____ Doctors with great bedside manner aren’t supposed to be angry. Unless you are the most relaxed unflinching individual, you will get angry with patients in certain situations. Anger can affect you performance, judgment, reputation, and health. If you find yourself becoming angry too often, it may be a manifestation of burnout, and even if you have infrequent bouts of anger, you ...

Top Five Signs You’re Suffering Burnout   5. You’re so tired you answer the phone “hell” instead of “hello.”   4. Your mom calls and you yell, “Get off my back, bitch.”   3. You’re so stressed you can’t remember how to pee.   2. You wake up and your bed is on fire, but you’re so tired you go back to sleep.   1. You think how relaxing it would be if you were in jail right now.   ____   Everyone is entitled to have a bad day... except peo ...

Doctor: “You have acute appendicitis.” Blonde: “I came here for medical help, not compliments.” ____ Everyone likes to be complimented. People feel good about themselves when they receive a compliment and they feel good about the person giving the compliment. ____ An ER Doctor: “No one likes to be told they are a terrible patient. It is very temping to agree with the patient who announces that they are the ’worst patient you’ll ever see.’ While they may be right, they prefer to hear you say, ’Oh, you’re not anyw ...

An ICU nurse says that when there is bad news to deliver, doctors often lack the bedside manner to deliver it well. “Doctors are sometimes not so great at it and they leave us standing there to deal with the family. I give them a hug because I’m that type of person. We don’t have any formal program to tell the family. Of course, after the fact, they can see grief counselors. There was this one guy who didn’t make it after open-heart surgery. We were just waiting for him to die and even after we unplugged everything he still held on. We couldn’t figure out what ...

Most people want health-care providers who communicate well and offer some level of conversation. Despite this obvious fact, some doctors don’t converse with their patients, and more importantly they don’t communicate at a most critical moment: when the patient is in distress or in pain. While every doctor responds to the screaming patient, only the perceptive observer reads body language to help him or her respond to less clearly expressed patients’ needs. Body language is a form of nonverbal communication ranging from the easy-to-read (laughing and crying: both of wh ...

Each professional must decide how to address patients and how they would prefer to be titled. Some doctors strive for a casual office while others prefer formality. There is a way to have both and to please most everyone. The way to greet patients varies from one geographic or socioeconomic setting to another. As a rule of thumb, staff should address young patients (under thirty years of age) by first name and older patients (over thirty years of age) by surnames. Doctors may use first names for most patients under sixty years of age. A twenty-year-old calling an eighty-year-old wom ...

There are countless ways you can make the patient experience better by using language that neither scares nor confuses. Many words should be stricken from office jargon or substituted with euphemisms. The more innocuous the terms used, the better the patient will feel about the procedure. Each practitioner needs a personal list of taboo words and field-specific terminology. There are good and bad ways to give patients information. In general, avoid technical terms. While these terms make the doctor appear learned, they are often confusing to the patient suddenly required to learn a new ...

Saint Peter had a terrible cold, so he asked Jesus if he could have the day off to go to the doctor. Jesus said, “Sure, I’ll watch the Pearly Gates for you.” It was a slow day and at the end of the day an old man with white hair approached the gates. “May I enter the Kingdom of Heaven?” Jesus replied, “We’d love to have you, but tell me what you’ve done to earn your space here among the good?” “I am but a simple carpenter, however my son was very special. I raised him to be a carpenter too, but a miraculous tran ...

A seven-year-old girl comes home from school and tells her mother, “A boy in my class asked me to play doctor.” “Oh, dear,” the mother nervously sighed. “What happened, honey?” “Nothing. He made we wait forty-five minutes and then double-billed my insurance company.” ____ Patients deplore waiting. The more apprehensive, aggravated, or inconvenienced they feel about seeing the doctor, the more volatile they become. While doctors with great bedside manner can often melt away patient hostility by entering the room with a resounding gracio ...