Bed 9 is deteriorating

I have always believed that I trained to become a doctor so that I could treat patients (not consumers or clients-that is a different story altogether). In order to be a partner in their journey as patients, helping them either get better, or get more time with their loved ones, or helping them have a dignified and hopefully, a comfortable death.

Unfortunately, what I have seen happen over the years is that our patients have been reduced to bed numbers or diagnoses. To illustrate the ludicrousness of this practice, once a nurse told me that the patient who was in bed 2 earlier in the day and was then moved to bed 6 and was then moved again to bed 9 was deteriorating! Wouldn’t it have been simpler to remember the patient’s name? Granted, living in a multicultural country like Australia does pose a few challenges-however, people are not stupid: many migrants have taken on ‘anglicised (dare I say ‘Australianised’?) names, and thus there is often no excuse to reduce them to numbers, or worse, to a description (of their illness).

Why does this happen? Is it that difficult for us health givers? We seem to have no difficulty in remembering complicated medical terms in Greek and Latin! Do we let this happen because there is no incentive to remember the names of our patients?

The purpose of our healthcare systems ultimately is to benefit our patients in one way or the other. A lot of our health systems use words such as respect, compassion, accountability etc. as representative of their core values. Where is the respect if we reduce our patients to a number (it is not just bed numbers that are used to describe them- it could also be a statement that goes like this - remember the patient with the troponin of 20?!)?

As Dale Carnegie wrote so many years ago, ‘Remember that a person’s name is to that person the sweetest and most important sound in any language’. Merely going to the trouble of remembering someone’s name makes the patient (and their family) warm up to you, and to establish the rapport, the personal connection that makes medicine so much more than just an application of knowledge and technology to solve a problem.

To paraphrase Michael Jackson (he of Propofol fame) in his song ‘Black or White’: I do not want my patients to spend their (hospital) lives being a number! Also, I do not want to use my knowledge to treat bed numbers- this was not what I had trained for!

Can we please make an extra effort to remember the names of our patients?

Disclaimer: The above views are my own and are not representative of the organizations I work for or am associated with.