|
Patients Rating Doctors: Let’s Pay Popular People More! Obligatory conflict-of-interest announcement: I am paid an hourly salary by a local government. My patients may fill out satisfaction surveys for other physicians in other settings, but they don’t for me. Part One of Three: My patient only had 20 minutes to wait for the van […] You’re working your way through your many patients one day, and this is what you encounter: A woman who won’t meet your gaze when you ask her questions. A man who rocks on the end of the exam table, arms crossed over his chest, eyes unfocused, even as he denies hearing voices. Another woman who […] With a traumatic brain injury, you feel yourself slipping away. You can’t remember things that used to come easily, things like how to find the grocery store — acts and details that live, mocking, at the edges of your thoughts, just outside your grasp. You know there’s something wrong, but you have a sense that it’s […] Most of us who write about health believe that knowledge can make a difference. But is the primary health issue facing us today a lack of knowledge? Or is it, instead, something I’d call the tenth-patient-of-the-day challenge? Here’s what I mean: You pick up a chart and head to Exam Room B, reading as you […] The most costly user of publicly financed emergency health services in San Francisco – a “frequent flyer†in emergency room parlance – is 49, Caucasian, schizophrenic, and addicted. He has been listed in at least two concurrent city systems as homeless (either continuously or episodically) for 16.6 years. He’s a frequent caller of ambulances (more […] What happens when someone dies who has no assets – or friends or relatives – to pay for his burial? As our society becomes more and more fragmented, and the economic crisis worsens for more and more people, your jurisdiction may be struggling to pay for the disposition of bodies of indigents. Or, perhaps you’ve […] |
|