Doctors and nurses are trained again and again on customer service but there is room for improvement. Following well-known acronym step programs comes … P.H.O.N.Y.
Administrators have learned that it is not enough for patient care teams to use research-based practice or the genuine caring that brought them into health care in the first place. To provide truly satisfactory patient care, we must think outside medical textbooks and embrace becoming PHONY.

P: Phone Chargers. It’s 2017; phone chargers for all types of phones must be available. Be willing to let the patient use your own charger for the time it takes to bring their phone to 100%. If no outlets are available, you must prioritize your resources. Any prudent clinician knows that a 27 year old with abdominal pain not being able to post on social media comes before continuous cardiac monitoring of a patient with known A-Fib.

H: Home Away from Home. We want patients to think of their hospital bed as a comfortable place to rest their head. This is why upon registration; patients will choose their pillow firmness preference and sheet count. They will also let us know if they would like to be woken up for medications/tests throughout the night.

O: Opioids.

N: Navigate. Let the patient navigate their hospital journey. If the patient wants a new MRI of their back after suffering from back pain for 10+ years, you are to ask “how sedated would you like to be during that test?”. Also allow the patient to choose their exact bed.

Y: YOU! Never forget that you are the center of the patient satisfaction experience. Make sure to put on your best smile, mind your manners and smell good. Tell the patient how this interaction will help you improve your practice. Think about the little things; hand deliver a favorite baked good (if the patient chooses not to be NPO) and post-discharge mail them a thank you note.

Work hard to remember to BE PHONY each day you work and satisfactory scores are bound to improve!

MADISON, WI – A new case report in the journal American College of Higher Education (ACHE) describes the first known case of self-induced auto-dystonia in a medical student.  The student, Jamie Turtle, had been known to be a very enthusiastic and attentive medical student, known for nodding emphatically during patient interviews.  This episode cast doubt about his sincerity.

“Jamie always looked like he cared when he was talking to patients,” said one medical school colleague, Lisa Ennuye.  “It was really inspiring.  But I guess all that nodding was manufactured and it finally caught up to him.  It’s pretty sad.”

Jamie’s resident, Dr. Jade Dunzo, detected the problem and reported it to the team’s attending who ordered two doses of IM Benadryl – one for Jamie and one for himself – as a much needed recreational pause during a particularly trying day of rounding on seventeen patients who stopped taking their Lasix for just long enough to have a pan-positive review of systems.

“I’d seen this reaction before in patients on antipsychotics,” says Dunzo.  “That neck stiffness.  It’s classic.  But I’d never seen it induced endogenously by an obsequious medical student.  This is what happens when you try to pretend to care too much.  It’s actually a good lesson for us all.”

Rumors were circulating that Jamie had previously been treated with Botox injections to the forehead, as a result of chronic repetitive forehead wrinkling, another tried-and-true method of appearing to give a crap about what a patient is saying.   However, this had not been a dangerous event, but rather, merely a poor cosmetic side effect associated with a well-known problem.

The key to so-called “receptive nodding,” many seasoned medical students say, is to appear to care about what a patient is saying just enough that your medical student colleagues, residents, and attendings think you’re empathetic (perhaps leading to a coveted nomination to the school’s chapter of the Gold Humanism Society), but not so much that dystonia is induced.  That can be a delicate balance, according to experts.

UPDATE:
This story has been modified to reflect breaking news that the student in question is actually taking haloperidol because the pressures of attempting to appear to be a caring medical student while projecting an overall sense of personal “wellness” is driving him batsh*t crazy.

It’s a question that has plagued mankind since the beginning of time, or least, mankind: Who should really be primary on this patient?  Gomerblog has searched through the literature, spending well over 15 maybe 16 minutes on the endeavor, and based on our findings we’ve created this handy-dandy chart to help you figure out where you should send your patient.  Remember, it’s best to make those phone calls to other services as early as possible or at 5 PM, whichever comes first.

In a usual twist of events, Nurse Betty Sue has prevented yet another resident from killing an unsuspecting patient.

Late in the evening, Nurse Betty Sue noticed that resident Dr. Jen Willis had ordered 100 times the usual dose of potassium via IV push which would surely result in the death of her dear patient.

Panicked, Betty Sue paged the resident but received no response. Knowing this was a fairly urgent matter, she waited 20 minutes and paged the doctor again. And after another 20 minutes, a third time.

Frustrated and concerned, she picked up the phone and called the resident knowing she would be very annoyed at best. But the doctor was not available by phone either. After some astute investigating, Betty Sue eventually found Dr. Jen Willis sleeping in the call room covered in Cheerios and saliva.

Given the grave nature of the problem, Betty touched base with the resident’s attending who ultimately corrected the faulty order. “Another brilliant batch of new doctors,” grumbled Attending Dr. Bill Wineberg.

The patient is now doing well after receiving the appropriate amount of potassium to correct her cardiac arrhythmia. “Doctors are so brilliant,” the patient stated, “I feel great!”

Nurse Betty Sue was later interviewed by the hospital’s Sentinel Event committee regarding the near miss error. When asked to comment, Betty Sue stated “I’m just doing my job and keeping my patients safe — thank you for asking.” When the resident was finally awake, Dr. Jen Willis griped, “The nurses really need to stop paging us so much.”

WASHINGTON, D.C. – The hospital administrators at Great American Hospital (GAH) are shaking in their suits today as hundreds of RNs are picketing outside. Their complaint: a recent overhaul requiring nurses to care for no more than four patients per shift.

The change in hospital policy was long overdue, according to Barry Wolfman, CEO of the hospital. “It seemed like our nurses were so busy all the time, some did not even get to take their required 30-minute breaks! Having more than 4 patients is far too much work for one person to accomplish in a twelve hour shift.”

Despite the CEO’s confident affirmation of the new policy, it is certainly not well received by the hospital’s nursing staff.

“What am I going to do all day if I’m not running around pulling my hair out with tasks? And who is going to constantly ask me for juice and crackers?” screamed Emma Grullon, a seasoned staff nurse.

“It’s insulting, really! Four patients? They think I can’t take care of more than four patients in one day? I can deal with seven, eight, nine even!” yelled another RN, who refused to state her name.

One nurse, a new graduate, was abruptly removed by security from the picketing party outside of the hospital. Sources claim that the new grad supported the policy, stating that she will have more time with each of her patients, and that they will all be safer as a result. Her ignorance enraged the party, putting her in immediate and justified danger.

“She’s still a kid, she doesn’t even know what she’s doing!” The group yelled.

The new policy at GAH was implemented three days ago, with the strike beginning just hours afterward. The strike caused a complete halt to all patient care, and the hospital has shut its doors for the time being. It is as if a hospital cannot effectively function without happy nurses.

SAN JOSE, CA – A new university stands proud and tall in the heart of downtown San Jose.  Empowered Patient University is enrolling its first class this year.  The new university will enroll people who want to either become empowered patients themselves or assist others with their medical issues.

Dean of the school, Kenneth Patterson, designed the school to meet an unmet demand from the population, empowering patients to make medical decisions on their own, disregarding medical experts.

“Many people were complaining about their physicians and other healthcare providers making medical decisions based on facts and their medical experience without listening or letting them make medical decisions,” said Patterson.

“Patients just didn’t feel satisfied with their experiences, which was confirmed by recent Press Ganey reports.  Doctors and nurses need to move aside in order to raise satisfaction.  Our goal is to educate people and patients on how to be empowered to make their own decisions, independent of health care provider’s opinions.  Our graduates will have the distinct honor and privilege of holding a Doctorate of Empowered Patient or as I like to call them, Patient Doctors.”

The school is enrolling over 300 “Patient Doctor” students and the curriculum is a 2-year program with classes on common diseases afflicting Americans.  Many people are asking what’s the difference between an empowered patient school and a medical school or a nursing school?  Patterson replied, “We are going to cut out useless classes like anatomy, microbiology, biochemistry, and histology and replace them with Google and Wikipedia lessons on ailments.  That’s the real meat of medical knowledge, not what the structure of ATP looks like.”

The first year will review the top 100 medical ailments on Wikipedia.  The second year can be used as an elective year to become an expert on one particular disease.

New student patient doctor, Amy Wikerbee, who does have fibromyalgia, plans to use her second year to become a fibromyalgia expert.  “I hope to become an expert on fibromyalgia and open up my own fibromyalgia clinic.  I will be an empowered patient myself, and I plan to seek out other fibromyalgia patients to help them become empowered to get more Dilaudid, the real treatment for this horrific non-cancer pain.”

Medical schools and nursing schools are becoming increasingly worried as this new approach will certainly stir the pot.  Take fibromyalgia for instance.  Most medical and nursing schools will spend on average only 1 day talking about this disease.  Empowered University students will have upwards of 365 days to research their topic on Google and Wikipedia.  Looking at the numbers, an empowered fibromyalgia patient graduating is going to have a huge leg up on new medical and nursing school graduates when it comes to fibromyalgia.

It is being reported that Jenny McCarthy has applied to the university and plans to do her elective on “vaccinations and other scientifically-proven treatments you should avoid.”

With disease specialization, empowered patients could become the new experts and possibly become the new standard of care for medical decisions.  “Patient doctors” could be consulted for advice instead of doctors or nurses.

“I’m excited,” said Patterson.  “We are taking empowered patients to the next level.  Soon we hope to take over the medical community altogether, and we will do it one disease at a time, with Wikipedia’s help of course!”