As EMR’s continue to replace paper charting in hospitals across the country, pre-made discharge instructions are becoming more popular.  However, a particular set of instructions is paving the way for pediatric emergency departments nationwide to appropriately inform families of problems with their children. It reads as follows:

Your child has been diagnosed with: Bad Parenting

After thorough investigation in the emergency department, it has been determined that your son or daughter has been diagnosed with a disease called “Bad Parenting”.  The origin of this ailment has many factors that contribute to its evolution and how it affects your child. This illness can sound scary and intimidating at first, but with proper technique can be corrected with minimal medical intervention.

Below are some of the signs and symptoms of “Bad Parenting”.  While it is possible your child may have all of them, keep in mind it is not necessary for all of the to be present in your child to make the correct diagnosis.

Signs and Symptoms 

• Your child has horrible manners. Your child frequently demands things from people and is unfamiliar with the word ‘please’.  He or she may be unclear when if comes to the concept of ‘sharing’.  Your child’s most frequent form of emotional expression may be the tantrum.  Teaching your child even a small amount of discipline can go a long way here.

• Your child is a spoiled little s***. It is thought that the origin of this particular symptom is parental overindulgence. If not corrected your child may go on to be a spoiled adult – the worst kind of person.  If allowed to reach adulthood without correction, the effects may be permanent.  To see examples of this, you can visit your local adult emergency department.  This is easily remedied when parents are willing to stop buying their children literally everything they want all the time.

• Your child’s parents are disinterested in their child’s care. This may not be apparent to your child’s doctor at first. The doctor may initially think your child’s parents are overly concerned about their child and frantically searching for answers on the internet, only to find out they’ve been refreshing college football scores and perusing Buzzfeed articles.  These types of parents may interrupt the doctor’s initial encounter to ask an unbelievably stupid question like “how long are we gonna be here?” or “can we hurry this up?  I got things to do.” But don’t worry, as your child’s parents, you have direct control over this.  Get off your fucking phone and pay attention – your child might actually have something wrong that you’d want to know about.

• Your child’s follow up appointments seem to get skipped. Your child repeatedly misses follow-up appointments after coming to the emergency department.  Perhaps your child’s parents thought their child didn’t need to add that second asthma medication or have insulin dosing adjustments made.  Perhaps your child’s parents are wrong. Dead wrong.  Your child needs to go to the doctor regularly.  Stop being an idiot.

• Your child’s parents are taking an ‘alternative’ approach to their child’s healthcare. These parents have often read ‘a lot of concerning stuff on the internet’.  They will delay vaccine sequences or skip them altogether.  They’re ‘not really medication people’ but show up in the emergency department anyway.  These parents go to their child’s regular pediatric appointments with new and totally asinine questions, which they have generated from internet garbage and ask for the advice of the doctor with no intent to follow it.  Correction of this part of “bad parenting” has thus far proven to be a true medical mystery.

As you can see, “Bad parenting” can take many forms, but much of it is correctable with proper treatment and simple parenting strategy changes.   Please seek further medical care for anything concerning with your child, but please do so at another facility.  Seriously.

© 2015 EMR Inc.

Although Press-Ganey scores have reportedly plummeted with these new discharge instructions being handed out, physician and nursing satisfaction scores have apparently skyrocketed.   Hospital staff believe that in the long term, the benefit of these new discharge instructions will eventually be realized.