Well, yes, I agree many of our patients are in the ward for non-medical reasons. (In fact, I always say that the majority of the problems that we have to solve during ward round and routine patient care are administrative problems and require merely a tiny dose of common sense rather than any medical knowledge.) Nonetheless, it remains a naive idea to believe that doing the round more frequently would facilitate the resolution of non-medical problems - unless you also hold the belief that holding meetings more frequently does help the business.
And we all know it won't. Doctrine of basic human psychology states that if one has more frequent opportunities to make a decision, he would be more tempted to procrastinate. The standard excuse is Let's wait until the time is ripe. For the same logic, we usually treasure the time we spend with someone whom we seldom have a chance to meet, but would turn a blind eye to the one whom we dine with every night.
PS. You may wonder if we have someone with the extraordinary character of not to procrastinate, would doing round more frequently help ?
Of course not. He would merely find more problems in his patients.
1 comment:
I just laughed when I read this.
There was a story my senior colleague (A) told me the other day about another colleague (B), who never had more than 2-3 patients at one time in our capitalist ward.
One day during weekend round, (A) was approached by (B)'s patient who insisted that he must be discharged. At that time, this man had neutropenic fever and a load of other problems.
(A) was very puzzled at his urgency and asked this young male patient "Why?"
The patient answered "That's because (B) never see's me! I've been in the ward for 2 weeks, and she's never stopped at my bed, or listened to me, or responded to even problems that I've given the nurses. I need to be discharged so that I that I can be readmitted as YOUR patient!"
So (A) found out the reason why (B)'s patients were always desperate to go home!
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