What Your Patient May Not Be Asking

The results of a British study appeared in Quality & Safety in Health Care recently regarding how comfortable patients feel asking doctors and nurses specific questions.  The results were interesting and I believe can make us all better healthcare workers.

Questions regarding length of hospital stay, anticipated time off work and details about the procedure they were going to have were relatively easy questions for patients to ask their doctors. When the same patients were asked how willing they would be to ask their healthcare providers specific safety and medical error questions, the response was much lower. 

Patients were much less willing to ask their doctor or nurse how many times they have performed a specific procedure and if they have recently washed their hands. The study did find that women were more likely to ask the more difficult questions opposed to men, and both men and women felt more comfortable questioning a nurse.

This study validates what many of us working in healthcare have known for a long time: Patients do feel more comfortable, in many instances, asking us questions instead of their doctor.

In mammography, patients always asking us why they were called back for another mammogram. Trying to redirect these types of questions back to the referring physician can be tricky at times. 

Another question that participants felt uncomfortable asking was "Who are you and what is your job?"

These questions can easily be put to rest by our initial introduction to the patient. By washing your hands and wiping the mammography unit down in front of the patient, we can hopefully answer some of the questions they were thinking about but were too afraid to ask.

Knowing what types of questions our patients are uncomfortable asking gives us the opportunity to instill a degree of confidence in our skills by answering these questions before they are spoken.