I’m not stupid, I know that when there’s a problem the patients often take it out on the team rather than me.
This isn’t just a Swords Orthodontics phenomenon, it happened when I worked in MaxilloFacial surgery in hospitals – I’d do the ward round in the morning and ask the patients if they were comfortable or needed any pain relief medicines after their injuries or surgery and they’d all say “no, thanks”. Then I’d get a call in the middle of your outpatients clinic to come back to the ward to write up analgesia prescriptions and I would ask the patients why they didn’t mention it when I was there to write it up and they’d say “I didn’t want to bother you”. There’s a white coat effect, multiplied by the number of people on the team doing the ward round, that renders the patient quiet and submissive for a while, but that wears off pretty soon after the white coats leave.
When we have an unhappy patient complaining they can’t get the appointment that they want and I have to call them, they usually agree straight away to the available one.
When I’m running late, and we can have another blog post about why that happens, patients might complain to my nurses or my front of house team. When I eventually call them in and apologise for being late seeing them, they usually answer “oh, no problem, you must be very busy”.
But not this guy that we had in recently.
We called him in 9 minutes late.
Appointment time 15.30, appointment commences 15.39. He was grievously unhappy in my direction.
He’d contacted the practice asking for a later appointment because he’d have difficulty coming in for an earlier one. He wanted to be seen after 15.45, but we were booked up and only had the 15.30 appointment as the latest one available, and so begrudgingly he agreed to be seen 15 minutes earlier than he wanted to be.
Demonstratively unhappy, he told me that he’d made the effort to come early, even though that was very difficult and then in the end he felt he was seen at basically the same time as he wanted in the first place. This was all explained to me personally, as opposed to merely directed to the reception staff. There wasn’t much I thought I could do about it beyond apologise and get on with my work.
I completed the adjustment by 15.44
I apologised again before spending the afternoon thinking I was the bad guy. At the Swords Orthodontics Morning Huddle the next day I was told that he’d come back to apologise later. I thought that was the mark of a man, and made a point of mentioning it to the team, observing that “anyone can have a bad day” until the team said “and then he blamed his wife for it” and I realised he wasn’t getting out of it that easily.