Keeping Your Patients Well Informed

Are you giving your patients adequate information after a surgery or a major procedure? It may be time to re-evaluate your patient education materials and or the way you respond to patient questions.

Post-op and post procedural care is so important to patient outcome and success. And I am often surprised when I hear from family members and friends that they didn’t get adequate information or adequate answers to their questions about recovery expectations.

What may seem obvious to medical people may not seem at all obvious to a patient without any medical background who is experiencing something way out of their comfort zone or area of expertise.

Responding to the question, “when can I expect to start exercising after my surgery?” with “whenever you feel like it,” doesn’t seem to be a good enough response to me. Surely adding some time frame to that response would be more helpful. How about giving the typical recovery time and go from there. Certainly, a patient’s age, general health status and many other factors make each case different, but in the case of patient information, “more is more.”

Take a look at your material, evaluate it and look at it from the perspective of a non-medical person and see if it answers the repeated questions that you get from your patients. If you are getting lots of calls after procedures from your patients with lots of questions, then your material probably isn’t doing the job.

Here are a few things to consider when developing patient information material:

• Develop a check list as to what material is given and by whom, to your patients post surgically and post procedural.

• Designate a specific person in your office to deliver the information and take the calls after the procedure is over. Giving their name and extension number can save a lot of frustration for the patient who might otherwise have to navigate a difficult phone tree.

• Address the most common issues that can go wrong after a certain procedure and what the patient should do about it.

• Define clear expectations for optimal recovery. For instance, how much physical therapy is going to be needed to get back up to speed.

• Be clear about pain medication; how to take it to get the maximum benefit. And how to get refills if allowed and needed.

• Educate the patient on signs of infection and any other serious things that can go wrong after a procedure.

• List limitations and general time frame for those limitations.

• Make sure the patient has adequate help at home. If they don’t, social services may need to be brought in to evaluate things.

This list could go on and on, but most importantly be open to patient questions. Try to anticipate what could come up and treat patient questions the way you’d like your questions treated in the same situation…with respect. There are no dumb questions in this case.

Do you wish you would have had better information from your physician after a surgery? If so, what?