A mulligan please, I have earned it.

A patient who has been coming to see me for 18 years saw me yesterday . He clearly has been very happy with the care he has received (he stated as much) and for the most part the service at the office. He complained long and intensely about an event two weeks ago where he had trouble getting refills on two medicines. The problem started in that he had not been in the office for over a year. I have blogged before about this issue and a year is on the extreme end of what is acceptable, six to nine months is more typical. One thing led to another and my staff and him got into a verbal tussle, with him loosing his composure and my staff digging their heels in.

Although I will admit there was probably an easier way to handle it, my point is that after 18 years of excellent treatment I expect to have earned several mulligans. Many in fact. Yet this one difficulty let him to think of taking his business elsewhere! As if he can find another office that only has a bad day every twenty years!  Good luck with that.

I am not saying that my staff did things wrong, their point was valid as were the patient’s complaints. I am saying that it could have been handled much more simply on both sides, but nevertheless, I fell that for every year we do well by our patients they owe us one mulligan for a bad encounter. Perhaps a real bad encounter would use up two mulligans. Nevertheless this patient’s tolerance for frustration is so low that it was all I could do not to hand him the list of nearby physicians and wish him luck with his extremely low tolerance . The number of patients that do that and then come back is legion. They do not know what the norm is out there and when they discover that they return. The number of patients that move away, but still within driving distance and remain with us is also legion.  We are by far the most flexible and understanding office in our area.

Perhaps we have spoiled out patients and we need to reevaluate our policies and become more strict. Interestingly there are many patients to do ‘get it’. These are usually patients that have significant experience with the world and can appreciate how much we work with them to help them out.

Someone this fragile is scary to us. We are not perfect and occasionally we will mess up, how will they deal with that?

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