Diffusing Difficult Patients

We have vaccines and antibiotics, surgeries and nutritional diets, housing and protective institution—we just have to make them work together. 

Curiosity is a superpower that many of us are not using as well as we could be as a way to reduce stress in our every day lives.

Imagine a Dr. Max and Dr. Min, faced with the policy against ‘one problem per visit,’ adapt differently in handling a patient with multiple concerns.

Dr. Robert Dickson comes across a case that reminds us of a lot of the important aspects of medical care.

People get sick, it happens. But when we see obvious patterns like repeated incidents of staff calling in sick before a weekend or the same employee being sick on a weekly basis, there is some work do to.

Got a story to tell? Send it in for consideration to run in the Medical Post magazine’s Stories Issue in December.

We are not lawyers. We are not real estate agents. However, that does not mean we are devoid of negotiating skills. Whether we are explaining a co-pay to a patient, signing an agreement with an employer, buying a pharmacy or making a staff schedule, there are parts of the pharmacist’s day where we just have to pull up our pants and negotiate.

In a live poll at the OPA RxTalks conference, 95% of pharmacists in the audience said they had experienced or witnessed mistreatment by a patient. The problem goes beyond the people in that room and it's time to address it.