Restore Confidence
Simple conversations can help hospitalists defuse patient dissatisfaction. When a patient asks why their PCP won’t be seeing them in the hospital, it’s best to begin with a reassuring approach. For example, introduce yourself and say you have reviewed the case with their PCP. You can include key information from their medical history and recent hospitalizations, if appropriate.
Robert Centor, MD, a hospitalist and associate dean of medicine at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, suggests a few other key behaviors for initial patient visits. He finds a way to make appropriate physical contact by taking a pulse, checking the heart and lungs, or patting a shoulder to clearly embody the role of the physician in charge.
“And pull up a chair,” he says. “If there is no chair, bring in a chair. But sit down—always.”
Dr. Centor also recommends a transparent approach, “especially in hospital medicine,” he explains. “Be explicit about what you’re thinking, what you’re doing, and why you’re doing it.”1
Transparency can protect you as it informs and comforts patients and their families. For instance, “hospitalized patients are probably hearing from every relative they have and half the friends they have,” Dr. Centor says. “If one of those people is a physician, they may be second-guessing you. You can overcome their wariness by remembering that this is all about bedside manner and the explanations you give them, including discharge instructions.”
Dr. Centor says your bedside manner needs to fit your personality. When you talk to a patient, use language that matches your personality. You can adopt someone else’s introductory script; just make sure to modify it to fit your work environment (see “Strategies to Ease Patient Concerns,” p. 29).
PATIENT BROCHURE COURTESY OF COGENT HEALTHCAREclick for large version
Figure 1. Make Patient Education a Priority.
“What Is This?”
Earlier this year, CJ Clarke of Leesburg, Fla., underwent a colonoscopy screening at a local doctor’s office. She had been kept on warfarin (Coumadin) to prevent complications, but after she bled for four days from a puncture sustained during the procedure, she went to the ED. She was admitted, but it wasn’t until the following afternoon that she learned that hospitalists—not her PCP— would be taking care of her.
“This totally unknown guy came in and said he would be filling in for my doctor and communicating with [my PCP],” Clarke says. “It was a weekend, and it turns out the first hospitalist was a substitute hospitalist, so then I got another hospitalist. The first one was subbing for the first hospitalist. I wasn’t exactly mad, but I thought, what is this?”
Clarke thought the first hospitalist was knowledgeable; she took comfort in that. “But the second one was extremely knowledgeable and explained the differences between Coumadin and heparin. He really knew his stuff. He talked to my cardiologist when she came in,” Clarke says. “The only thing that I was sorry about was that my primary didn’t seem to get the information very rapidly.”
Care coordination is a vital step in the discharge process, especially when patients think the flow of information between a hospital and a PCP is immediate and seamless. When Clarke was discharged and she returned home, she scheduled an appointment with her PCP. “When I first called, my [PCP] had not even heard I had been admitted,” Clarke says. But by the time she visited the PCP, “she knew everything. … I think it would have been good if sometime during that five-day hospitalization, she had been told—not afterward. Not that she would have come in, because that is not her policy, but just to know she knew.”