The employee behind the Knoxville pharmacy counter approached. “I’m here to pick up a prescription, please,” I said. The response: “What’s the date of birth?”
Behind the doctor’s office desk, the receptionist spoke while staring into the computer monitor: “I need your insurance card.”
At a local hospital’s surgical waiting area, the room was full of people waiting for their names to be called to complete their registration. A staff member emerged from an office every few minutes to shout out a last name: “James!” “Thompson!” “Clark!” When my name was called, it was with the same bark and tone that revealed what was behind it: “Come on, let’s go, I’ve got a lot of other people to deal with.”
In each instance, I paused, then moved a bit closer, and spoke quietly. I said, “I have a suggestion, for your benefit. I’m not angry, and I’m not going to complain to your boss. It’s to your advantage if you put a ‘please’ on the front or back end of what you just said. Otherwise, it’s a demand, or a command, and you probably really don’t want it to seem that way.”
A surprising number of people in health care who do so much good for so many seem to not recognize a basic fact of life: people wish to be treated with respect, not as a last name yelled out across a room, and not as someone receiving a command or demand to produce their name or insurance card, right now!
Everyone reading this has experienced the same thing, which frequently comes at a bad time for them. Usually, someone goes to a doctor or hospital because they have a health problem. They may be anxious, uncertain, shaken, apprehensive or scared to death. When the moment arrives for them to be seen, they aren’t reassured or uplifted when their last name is shouted as if they are a kid in a classroom being called down by the teacher.
An epidemic of unintended disrespect
Old sayings are old sayings for a reason, usually because there’s truth in them. An old saying, “You don’t get a second chance to make a first impression,” is true, and throughout Knoxville – and Tennessee and the U.S. – a continuing epidemic of generally unintended discourtesy and disrespect is damaging health care organizations’ relationships with their patients and patients’ families – and costing those organizations money.
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“Patient experience” are big buzzwords in today’s health care world. Simply put, it’s how people feel about the care they received, which extends to how they believe they were, or weren’t, respected. Courtesy connected to medical care is more than thoughtful: it can pay.
The Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems survey is a national tool that measures patients’ perspectives and responses to hospital care. The Center for Medicaid and Medicare Services website explains the survey’s purpose:
“The HCAHPS survey asks discharged patients 29 questions about their recent hospital stay. The survey contains 19 core questions about critical aspects of patients’ hospital experiences (communication with nurses and doctors, the responsiveness of hospital staff, the cleanliness and quietness of the hospital environment, communication about medicines, discharge information, overall rating of hospital, and would they recommend the hospital).”
HCAHPS has a series of communication-related survey questions. The answers are subjective, which should encourage courtesy: HCAHPS scores are tied to hospital reimbursement rates, so there’s both a reputational and financial price to pay for bad scores.
The problem of discourtesy is nationwide. A doctor who seems dismissive, a technician who tells a colleague he’ll be back after he takes “this guy” to get an X-ray, the registration employee whose eyes roll while a patient is looking for their Medicare card. It’s everywhere.
A few months ago, my wife was in a Knoxville hospital emergency department treatment room. Her medical problem at that time was scaring us both. An ER staff member was attending to her when another employee entered the room, asking about something that clearly wasn’t an emergency. Suddenly, they were in a genial conversation. Why I let this occur at all, I don’t know. Fortunately for all of us, the second fellow left an instant before I was about to tell him to get out unless he was there to help my wife.
Health care professionals aren’t immune
Medical professionals experience this as well. An example, in Ohio’s Toledo Blade newspaper, is the observations of S. Amjad Hussain, an emeritus professor of surgery and humanities at the University of Toledo: “I am always amazed when a young nurse or a nurses’ aid comes to the waiting room and yells the first name of a waiting patient who happens to be three times her age. Or blurting out the last name of the person without the honorific ‘Mr.’ Recently while waiting to see my physician, a young nurse came to the waiting room and shouted ‘Hussain.’ I kept quiet. She looked around and asked me if I was Hussain. I told her that to her I was Mr. Hussain. To that she said, ‘Whatever.’ You expect such a derisive response from a junior high student and not from a professional working in a doctor’s office.”
Why is it this way? Pride? Are some health care workers showing who they think is the important person in this interaction? They have important jobs, so they’re exempt from showing courtesy? Or is it simply tiresome, because today they’re going to encounter another river of faces in the never-ending river of faces, and it’s too much trouble?
There are multitudes of caring, thoughtful, kind health care workers, doing essential work. However, negativity sticks, as a Columbia University study noted: “… research shows that humans often remember negative or traumatic experiences over positive ones.”
A few weeks ago, at a doctor’s office, the lady behind the reception desk looked at me and said, “Good morning, sir. How may I help you?” I said I was there for my appointment. She said, “May I have your insurance card, please?”
I paused, moved forward, and spoke quietly. “Yes, I have my card, but I’d first like to say something.” She looked at me nervously. “I want to thank you for speaking so thoughtfully. That doesn’t always happen in medical offices, and I much appreciate your courtesy. It matters.”
She bloomed like a flower. For us, and for health care generally, there ought to be a whole lot more bloomin’ goin’ on.
George Korda is a political analyst for WATE-TV, hosts “State Your Case” from noon to 2 p.m. Sundays on WOKI-FM Newstalk 98.7 and is president of Korda Communications, a public relations and communications consulting firm.
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