Message to Staff Members who Work in Doctors' Offices

[Anonymous]

(I know I have the wrong audience here, so it's really a vent...)

Please try to be helpful to patients and their parents, especially if you know they're standing in front of you (or on the phone with you) because their children may be very sick/badly injured or they're possibly suffering from a scary disease themselves! Please try to help them out with some basic problem-solving, even if you're sure whatever administrative trouble they're having is someone else's responsibility to sort out. If it's within your power to solve it in just a few minutes, maybe by looking something up or making a quick phone call, please do it. Also, please fax referrals and other paperwork so patients dealing with bad stuff don't have to make an additional trip. And if someone in your office made a mistake, please help fix it even if it wasn't your fault. If you did your part but the other doctor's office screwed up, possibly causing you to have to repeat your part to allow timely treatment to go forward, please help without griping or stonewalling. Worrying about a sick child, taking care of a sick child while struggling to keep up with everything else, or being sick yourself is bad enough. Please help with the little things that shouldn't turn into a big deal.

Between my daughter's recent head injury that's starting to look like it could possibly be scarier than we initially expected and my own routine screenings for an also scary disease for which I'm at high risk that were due in the last few weeks, I've been visiting doctors twice a week for one reason or the other lately. Most of these visits have been inherently nerve wracking, making the frequent administrative headaches and lack of professional response seem like an additional insult. I don't really understand this, because while I know that these are paraprofessional positions, I would still expect more helpfulness and compassion from fellow women and mothers, especially in the broader health care field.

I think patients can absolutely tell when a doctor has instructed his/her staff to really make administrative transactions as smooth for patients as possible. I'm not going to name and shame the bad ones, but I do want to compliment a couple of great ones: Everyone in Dr. Katharine Alley's office is committed to making administrative details as easy as possible for patients and will even call around to help with scheduling tests on short notice. Also, everyone I've dealt with at (and through) Georgetown's pediatric neurology department has been especially helpful (and yes, similarly not adverse to doing a little legwork so I have one less thing to worry about). When patients or their parents are already worried sick and under a lot of stress, these things make a big difference.

[Anonymous]

((Hugs)) to you, OP.

[Anonymous]

hang in there

[Anonymous]

I hope things work out for you!!

Here is an explanation, you may not like: I worked in a doctor's office years ago. In general, most patients were extremely nice and I would have NO problems bending over backwards for them. There are times when I had to focus on other emergencies, for example processing the paperwork to have an 11 year old committed to a child psych hospital. I had to do this while the boy was attacking the therapist and father in the office. I couldn't really do more than be civil and blunt to get the other patients in and out quickly. I certainly couldn't explain what was going on to them. Or the time I had to remind a patient she needed to remember her copay amounts because I couldn't look it up... due to my line being tied up with a 16 year who just drank Downy in a suicide attempt. Sometimes office staff have to focus on other things and really don't know the details of your treatment (offices can have hundreds of patients). I am sad for you that you felt upset. Office workers must deal with some very demanding patients and with some high maintenance doctors. You have to remember that sadly you might not be the only patient dealing with some horrible diseases.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I hope things work out for you!!

Here is an explanation, you may not like: I worked in a doctor's office years ago. In general, most patients were extremely nice and I would have NO problems bending over backwards for them. There are times when I had to focus on other emergencies, for example processing the paperwork to have an 11 year old committed to a child psych hospital. I had to do this while the boy was attacking the therapist and father in the office. I couldn't really do more than be civil and blunt to get the other patients in and out quickly. I certainly couldn't explain what was going on to them. Or the time I had to remind a patient she needed to remember her copay amounts because I couldn't look it up... due to my line being tied up with a 16 year who just drank Downy in a suicide attempt. Sometimes office staff have to focus on other things and really don't know the details of your treatment (offices can have hundreds of patients). I am sad for you that you felt upset. Office workers must deal with some very demanding patients and with some high maintenance doctors. You have to remember that sadly you might not be the only patient dealing with some horrible diseases.

... OK, many thanks to all PPs. In response to this one, the problems we have been having are things like failing to send referrals as promised, sending them to the wrong fax number (usually to the previous recipient's fax number) even though a correct one was provided, scheduling for one doctor in a practice but telling us we had an appointment with (and instructing us to have the referral made out in reference to) a different one, claiming to have lost all record of my having scheduled an appointment for which I subsequently presented my child--until I started to cry (given that this was the most recent one and I'm dead tired of this crap that isn't at all over yet), which prompted the lady to actually do a little looking-- and guess what? I also had to collect medical records that turned out to be incomplete and would have required me to make a second trip if I hadn't insisted on the receptionist looking into it. After shrugging off my questions with a brusque "This is what they gave me", she tried holding the envelope open disdainfully for me to look, but having never seen the study results format from this doctor, I had to point out that I didn't know what I was looking for. With a lot of eye rolling, she finally resolved this with a 2-second call to her manager, who brought out a CD with apologies because in fact, it hadn't been added to the envelope.

These seem like simple incompetence and lack of taking responsibility for problem-solving issues to me. I'm fairly sure these women are not distracted by concurrent emergency situations and in fact are simply unhelpful. I'll add callous, too, because of the way they respond when we ask them (nicely) to fix the problems that either they themselves have caused or only they can fix in short order. Also, the people we ask for referrals or the receptionists who have just checked us in for appointments know that we're dealing with head trauma fall-out and cancer screenings, respectively. No mysteries.

[Anonymous]

PP here who worked in a doctor's office. I would discuss this with the office manager and/or doctor in person. If there is no office manager, I would totally schedule an appointment with the doctor, even if I had to pay initially out of pocket. The doctor will get them in shape!!

[Anonymous]

...or write a letter to the doctor.

[Anonymous]

I work in healthcare. I strongly suggest that you give your feedback to the physician. The majority of the time, the physician has no idea what is going on staff wise. He/she usually leaves that up to the Office Manager to deal with; however, at times the Office Manager is just as bad as the other staff members. So tell the physician - he may appreciate that you did, afterall it is his practice and bottom line the bad apples are effecting his business.