Calling Singapore doctors...
How much of your curriculum time in med school is given to teaching the softer side of the science of patient care, hmmm?
OK, let's back track a bit: Do you think that being sensitive to a patient's fears and insecurities can be taught at all? Or is it a function of how much of a human being you are?
I ask because I've seldom seen my human so angry. She had just come from her annual physical, upset with the way the doctor treated her. He was cold, impersonal, cursory and offered little by way of assurance, considering that it had been 10 years or more since her last physical. (The hypochondriac that she is, she was imagining she had all kinds of illnesses, waiting to be uncovered.)
Dr N was also plain insensitive and also criticised the judgement of my human's other doctors along the way, which is a shamefully unprofessional thing to do. He gets a F for bedside manner, in short.
Maybe he had personal problems. Or his favourite prata man didn't make his prata just the way he liked it that morning. Or maybe he was plain frustrated at being a GP, stuck in an endless cycle of examining executives day in, day out, when he really, really wanted to be a top-flight, big-bucks brain surgeon. But all these don't qualify as excuses to abuse patients.
I don't need to go into details here about Dr N and what went on during the consultation, but suffice to say, the chappie needs to re-read the code of ethics for doctors found on the Singapore Medical Council's website. (If you ask my human, she thinks he ought to have his bonus docked and to be given a warning letter, if not also fired.)
This calls to mind a letter that was written to The Straits Times Forum page not long ago, in which the writer told of the night his father died in A&E after being admitted with chest pains.
After the requisite life-saving measures had failed and time of death had been called, the doctor went out to the waiting room and announced baldly to the deceased's son: "Your father has flat-lined."
Flat-lined? FLAT-LINED?? Sure, if a doctor told me that, I'd know what he meant, but couldn't he have put it in a more humane way? It seemed to be lost on the doctor that although he had just lost a "patient", or just had a "case" die on him, someone out there had lost a Loved One. Surely the same news could be delivered in a more compassionate way?
The NUS med school must have a secret pod of alien eggs, hatching out these "physicians".
Anyway, my human was told that Dr N would be "counselled". She had asked the boss of the health-screening clinic whether Dr N would be ticked off, but the boss - a doctor himself - said he would get HR to "counsel" him, "because we are doctors first, not administrators".
Oh no, doctors don't deal with ticking off one of their own. Let the HR people do it.
To appease my human, this boss bought her a CAKE, and thanked her for her "feedback". He even admitted to my human that he believed her story because other patients have complained about Dr N before!
Well, does he intend to go all over Singapore delivering cake and doing crisis Patient Relations to cover for the doctor who consistently falls short of the requirements necessary to be one, and falls short even of the requirements to be a human being?
Get rid of the scumbag, I say.
OK, let's back track a bit: Do you think that being sensitive to a patient's fears and insecurities can be taught at all? Or is it a function of how much of a human being you are?
I ask because I've seldom seen my human so angry. She had just come from her annual physical, upset with the way the doctor treated her. He was cold, impersonal, cursory and offered little by way of assurance, considering that it had been 10 years or more since her last physical. (The hypochondriac that she is, she was imagining she had all kinds of illnesses, waiting to be uncovered.)
Dr N was also plain insensitive and also criticised the judgement of my human's other doctors along the way, which is a shamefully unprofessional thing to do. He gets a F for bedside manner, in short.
Maybe he had personal problems. Or his favourite prata man didn't make his prata just the way he liked it that morning. Or maybe he was plain frustrated at being a GP, stuck in an endless cycle of examining executives day in, day out, when he really, really wanted to be a top-flight, big-bucks brain surgeon. But all these don't qualify as excuses to abuse patients.
I don't need to go into details here about Dr N and what went on during the consultation, but suffice to say, the chappie needs to re-read the code of ethics for doctors found on the Singapore Medical Council's website. (If you ask my human, she thinks he ought to have his bonus docked and to be given a warning letter, if not also fired.)
This calls to mind a letter that was written to The Straits Times Forum page not long ago, in which the writer told of the night his father died in A&E after being admitted with chest pains.
After the requisite life-saving measures had failed and time of death had been called, the doctor went out to the waiting room and announced baldly to the deceased's son: "Your father has flat-lined."
Flat-lined? FLAT-LINED?? Sure, if a doctor told me that, I'd know what he meant, but couldn't he have put it in a more humane way? It seemed to be lost on the doctor that although he had just lost a "patient", or just had a "case" die on him, someone out there had lost a Loved One. Surely the same news could be delivered in a more compassionate way?
The NUS med school must have a secret pod of alien eggs, hatching out these "physicians".
Anyway, my human was told that Dr N would be "counselled". She had asked the boss of the health-screening clinic whether Dr N would be ticked off, but the boss - a doctor himself - said he would get HR to "counsel" him, "because we are doctors first, not administrators".
Oh no, doctors don't deal with ticking off one of their own. Let the HR people do it.
To appease my human, this boss bought her a CAKE, and thanked her for her "feedback". He even admitted to my human that he believed her story because other patients have complained about Dr N before!
Well, does he intend to go all over Singapore delivering cake and doing crisis Patient Relations to cover for the doctor who consistently falls short of the requirements necessary to be one, and falls short even of the requirements to be a human being?
Get rid of the scumbag, I say.
posted by AmyC at 10:05 PM
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