Are they really that much harder to deal with. The Happy Hospitalist with a story:
The reason why we don’t call you, most likely is because you complain, you bitch, and you obstruct my ability to care for patients. You may be the best damn surgeon in the world, but if you can’t get a long with people in a respectful, civilized way, you will never get a call from me.
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{ 6 comments }
It’s not really a rant about how surgeons are so hard to get along with. The gist of the post is about how another hospital’s ER tried to surrepititiously dump a post-op surgical complication (sepsis from a total knee) onto his hospitalist service.
Peripherally it has to do with the operating orthopedist refusing to see his patient in the originating ER. Whether he was right to do so or not, we’ll never know because HH never saw the patient (refused transfer) and we have only sketchy info on the patient in question.
From this it follows that certain surgeons are so difficult to get along with? BFD. So are any number of other doctors, including the HOSPITALISTS, and HH’s saintly internists. We can all swap horror stories about difficult colleagues. Do we really want to go there??
anon 4:11
well said
anon. You are correct. I have difficult colleagues in the medical specialty field as well as primary care docs in the community that I must communicate with. I try to avoid all of them when I can. My job doesn’t facilitate me the need to consult another internist or hospitalist so my experience is skewed to specialists as far as difficulties with personalities.
I didn’t in any way mean to say that it is only a one way street involving surgeons. I love surgeons. It has more to do with the person than the field.
I have great working relationships with the vast majority of surgeons. That has more to do with the person, not the field.
No hard feelings were implied, only that two docs have to be on the same team when working with a mutual patient.
In fact, it was not the ER who was trying to “dump”, it was the PCP who was trying to “dump”. I think more out of his own frustration than anything.
This doesn’t happen very common, but when I does, I have to stand my ground.
I don’t think internists are saints. I’ve never said that.
I agree if you don’t like getting dumped on, don’t do shift work. That’s what you signed up for. Think administration which pays the salaries directly for hospitalist and ER services really care. They just don’t want their surgeons taking their ball and going to another court.
anon 1253, to clarify, I don’t consider any patient a “dump”. My reference as a dump was to someone else who called it dumping.
Every patient is someones granny or daughter. I respect them all as a person.
Now that that is clarified, for the record, doing shift work does not equate to being “dumped on”
I am not an employ of the hospital. I am in a private practice. I am part of a contract with mutually agreed on terms. One of those terms does not include being a shift working slave and a whore.
I am not your slave or your whore, somebody there to please your needs. I do what I think is right for the patient. I am a doctor, just like you. One who is credentialed to practice in the specialty of internal medicine. One who respects you as a person and a physician. All the time. Unless I have a reason not to respect you. At which point you become useless to me. I get help for my patients from someone else.
To make the blanket assumption that doing shift work equates to allowing others to dump on me, that’s like saying everyone should dump on the ER. Everyone should dump on the on call cardiologist, pulmonologist, surgeon, etc..
It is a a strange and myopic statment. It is so silly it’s almost worth no response at all.
So you think no one dumps on the ER? That is comedy.
It is in my contract with the hospital to provide ER coverage, I’m a consult only service because that’s the only way they have coverage. I am an outpatientist not a hospitalist, they do their job I do mine and everyone has a Merry Christmas.
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