Month: January 2015

Automated feedback texts

An article on the Guardian’s ‘Comment is free’ website is attracting a lot of attention. Within two days of posting, it has been ‘shared’ on social media nearly 27,000 times and attracted 650 comments. The article is a first-person account of experiencing a miscarriage. The couple received excellent, sympathetic care, undermined somewhat by an automated text the next day asking, ‘How likely are you to recommend our A&E department to your friends and family if they needed similar care or treatment?’ The text presented a 5-point Lickert scale and asked respondents to text back 1 to 5 on the basis of how likely there were to recommend that A&E.

Patients bearing gifts

The online journal Hektoen International has an article this month by Anthony Papagiannis on unusual gifts he has received from patients, which includes a knitted waistcoat, a wooden model of temple, an icon and several signficant books.

He says, ‘the unselfishness of the act speaks louder than words. It is behavior like this that makes me forget the injustices of the system, the small and large tragedies that I encounter daily in the practice of medicine, and keep going.’ Gratitude for gratitude.

Gratitude poem

I love this poem by Sue Sun Yom (to whom I am grateful for permission to reproduce it here). It is published on p. 111 in an anthology called Body Language: poems of the medical training experience, edited by Jain, N., Coppock, D. and Brown Clark, S., published by Boa Editions, NY: Rochester.

Gratitude

Mr. H, taciturn and a little odd, Whose wife preferred another man, And who would come faithfully Late by fifteen regular minutes Each Friday. Mrs. V and her loyal Veterinarian daughter, the other An internet mogul in Hawaii, Who wanted only for us to spare The eyebrows, though she’d lost All sense of self and hair.

The ‘Thank you’ project

This is a sad story with a heartwarming ending. When Kellie Haddock’s son Eli was a few months old, the family was involved in a card accident that killed her husband and left Eli with serious injuries. A chance meeting at a prayer group led to a film being made of Kellie finding everyone involved in saving Eli’s life, thanking them personally, and inviting them to a concert to celebrate Eli’s recovery. The blog posting about how it came to be made is here.

Toasty thank you on ‘Saturday Live’

The programme ‘Saturday Live’ on Radio 4 has a regular slot where listeners say ‘thank you’ for good deeds. Health care professionals are regularly thanked on the show. Today (3 January) there was a lovely item in which a nurse was interviewed about thanks expressed by patients. The story started some months ago when a patient, Rami Seth (sp?), came on to express thanks for a slice of warm toast smuggled in by nurse Rosie Wilson while he was recovering from major surgery. Rosie spoke eloquently about how touched she was to hear the thanks expressed. It brought home how a small gesture, such as delivering a slice of warm toast, can mean a great deal to patients.