The Importance of Staying in Touch

I realized recently why things are always so slow to start up after the trimester break. It really hit home today when a patient complained that he had called his new intern 3-4 times in a few days’ time, leaving messages every time, and the intern never bothered to call back.

I am the first to know that we all have personal lives, but your commitment as an intern, and soon as a doctor, is to take care of people. That doesn’t always happen at a time that is convenient for you, and you are often asked to make sacrifices to take care of others. This is the reality of being a doctor of any type. Calling a patient back is hardly a sacrifice… this is a person who wants to come into the clinic weekly, and his intern is too busy or too preoccupied to return a phone call? In the real world this is a patient who would be switching to another practice.

Anyway, I started thinking about the trimester break. Senior interns start checking out of clinic a couple weeks before finals. Junior interns are still worrying about finals, and so they think “Well, I’ll call this patient next week…” Well, think again. Finals goes on for a couple weeks, then there is the trimester break. I’m sure a lot of interns take “one last vacation” or veg out a little. Coupled with the reduced clinic schedule, all of a sudden we have a recipe for disaster…. Senior interns start turning patients over to junior interns a week or two before finals, the juniors are studying and worried about finals and then check out mentally for the break, thinking “I’ll get that patient in soon when school starts back up…” and lo and behold, 4-5 weeks have gone by without any communication with these patients.

Not only is this inconsiderate of these patients, who need and want your care, but it is very poor patient management. Like I already mentioned, in the “real world” every single one of these patients would have thrown the towel in with you and found a new doctor to take care of them. I had close to 25 chiropractic offices in the town of 38,000 I practiced in. It would be effortless to find a new doctor who could see a patient the same day. You better believe I stayed in good communication with patients!

Put good habits into place now. Call your patients and schedule them as soon as they are transferred to you. Schedule time for a patient transfer evaluation and fill it out properly by spending some time with the patient’s file. This is what you will be doing everyday for the rest of your career if you plan on practicing, so you should get comfortable with this now, as well as juggling exams, personal life, finances, etc. Life doesn’t get any less hectic in practice.