Simon James wrote:
> What would happen with a traditional telephone reminder in the same
situation? Is there any consent given with home number reminders? Do receptionists declare where they are calling from when asking to speak to a patient?
Ours don't, for that reason. It seems anti-social and rude for them to phone a patient's home, office or mobile and say only: "Is Mary there?", but that is what they have been taught to do at the staff courses to which we have sent them, because it would breach the patient's privacy even to say: "This is Debbie calling from Hampstead Medical Clinic. I would like to speak to Mary."
Clearly it would help if our practice computer system had a kind of communications screen in the patient's record in which we could record the fact that Mary had explicitly told us that we can say who we are if we need to phone her. We might need a field for every kind of communication and every phone number that Mary might have. For example, a field with her work phone number may say: "Do not identify the practice or yourself if you have to phone Mary on this number". This is beginning to sound a bit tedious even as I write this.
I heard a fascinating piece on Radio National about the consternation caused by the introduction of the telephone. There were fears that social mores and order would break down. Before the telephone, people (especially men) could meet young ladies only through a formal process of making an approach to the girl's family to express interest in getting to know the young lady, and then being introduced at an arranged meeting only in the presence of the young lady's family or chaperone. With the telephone, anybody could just phone her up directly. I suppose what we are seeing here is that communication has become so unstructured that for sensitive and important matters like medical care, we now have to re-introduce some rules about how we communicate with our patients.
-- Oliver Frank, general practitioner 255 North East Road, Hampstead Gardens, South Australia 5086 Phone 08 8261 1355 Fax 08 8266 5149 Mobile 0407 181 683 _______________________________________________ Gpcg_talk mailing list [email protected] http://ozdocit.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/gpcg_talk
