“Please call me when they go upstairs”

[The Knife & Gun Club]

One of the questions I’m still grappling with how to generate a satisfactory answer to. “Please call me when pop-pop leaves with the transfer ambulance for Our Lady of Medicare regional hospital”

Or 1000 different permutations of the question above. Let me know when he gets out of the OR. Let me know when the HD cath is in. Let me know when they get to their new room.

I have been trying without avail to find an adequate way to politely tell reasonable-ish people that I have no idea when these things happen and if I did certainly don’t have the time to call and update every family about this stuff. I’m already shoulder deep in the next poo lagoon on the rack.

Obviously as a courtesy I will do it if I have the time and knowlege but a lot of times that’s not realistic.

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[gruemd]

"Leave your number with the nurse taking care of him/her and make sure they know you'd like a call. We'll try and let you know about major updates but you may need to call back to check in due to the large number of patients we take care of daily."

Then forget about it and move on. All the floors/ICUs in my residency had a policy of "families get a call once a day between 7-8 PM to one designated contact" unless something major happened and it usually worked out alright.

 

[southerndoc]

Epic event based texting for the win. Sign up, they get automatic notifications when patients move, and you can send family members (that patient has given permission to receive) texts. They can't reply either so you don't get any interruptions.

 

[WhatJobDoIPick]

Seems like a nursing task

 

[watermanMD]

Yeah I usually just say, “oh yeah, ok sure. I’ll let nursing know or you can always just call back yourself to check on them.” I then hang up and go on about my day with zero intention of putting any more effort into that.

 

[ShockIndex]

I tell them that I’m already running late to my appointment at the sperm bank and will be hard at work when the patient moves.

 

[the messenger]

I don't think that's a good use of your time. I agree that if you do it, it's more for courtesy rather than responsibility. It should be delegated to ancillary staff.

Ideally this would be automated tracking, kinda like UPS scans for packages or how surgeons/endoscopists get epic notifications as a pt moves from pre-op to OR to post op--the physician can get an EMR/page notification of each move the pt makes. If that's tough to implement, implement it as a clerical responsibility. If the receiving hospital has Epic, the transfer tracking is pretty good--they could have their clerk follow it on their end. For ICU pts, we'd get a courtesy page from the clerk when they hit the floor or were en route to the unit. If you want to take this up in your own dept, and your clerical staff is too busy, you could make a case that if you're not practicing at your highest scope, your group is losing revenue because you're making phone calls and not seeing pts and billing for them, so they should hire one more clerk to make calls and free up your time to be productive. Might have to back it up with volume metrics, etc. Let the clerk practice at the top of their scope (make phone calls, organize/file charts) while you practice at the top of yours (see pts, put in orders, notes). An efficient system maximizes the productivity of each role.

When I go to the ED to see an ICU admission, if I need a notification, I'll ask the RN to send me the page or have my ICU RN touch base and notify me (they're often waiting for the pt with their empty bed, so they might have more bandwidth than everyone else). I couldn't imagine asking an EM doc in the trenches to stop and make a phone call for something like that. It's a poor use of your time. Obviously RNs can be super busy too, so I try to minimize my requests.