Follow Up

31st March (Tuesday) - It's already the end of March, and April is just less than 12 hours away. There's not much to be said, except I'm still at the counter until further notice. Last minute I was given a half day off, which means hurriedly making a phone call to re-arrange my whole follow up. After much discussion, I settled for today after work. Not much I can do about it.
After clocking out to avoid unfair overtime claim, I went over for my follow up. Well, since on the first session I had emptied all my bottled up feelings, today's session involves identifying the problem in my workplace. Let's just say a nurse's job is never fun, and if you think about it, most of our job are really a big headache, but the goal of today's session is to find out what I dislike most and what I like most. She gave me a large sheet of paper with rankings on them and I'm supposed to list out the tasks that I had difficulties with.
As I pondered with the pen and list, what do I usually hate in my job? Well, I don't hate them all, but there are really some that drives me up to the wall, like paperworks, insurance, simple procedures with a sudden complicated twist, patients not turning up when you put so much effort in appointment... Yep, there's a lot of things in my head. To avoid further complications, I just list out as much as I could. When I'm done, I realized most things I listed out are ranging from 3 to 5, 8 to 10. (1 being the least complex, 10 being the worst.) The psychologist went though each of them, and I gave her the examples for the sections that I had listed.

Appointments -  You would think patients would at least remember that they fixed an appointment with us, but sorry to say, most of them never turn up. After all the effort you went though. At least please give a phone call or something instead of making us and the poor doctors wait. My mentor warned me calling patients are a big NO-NO, unless it's important like dressings, but normal patients for normal follow up, we usually call them on the day itself, like after 30 minutes of the scheduled time to avoid getting nagged by the patient for being 'annoying' or 'busybody'.
Insurance - Absolute nightmare for everyone, except maybe for the admission counter. There are tons of insurance and besides making sure you got the right form, you have to make sure that the policy number and the form are a match. Some insurance have many categories to the point where there are several forms with the same logo but different details. And insurance agents always seem to call the wrong people. Nurses do not fax the insurance, those are all handled by the admin office, but heaven knows why they always call the nurses and doctors.
Investigations -  Most of the time X-Rays are the most easiest and straightforward, but for MRI and blood test, it's a whole different level, especially MRI. You have to call the technicians/radiologists to get a slot, and pray hard that it's not too late. Because MRI is open to all, inpatients and outpatients, if it's just a normal case and not urgent/important, they tend to push the unimportant cases behind. To us it's not a big issue, but for patients, time is important. If you don't give them the time, they'll end up waiting the whole day and they're going to give you a whole lot of ticking off next time they see your face, and trust me, they never, NEVER forget your face.

Just a random few, but you get the idea. Because time was a little squeezed for this follow up session, the psychologist gave me a list of common thinking errors to identify and, all of things, a thought diary. Yes! I got to write a diary on my thoughts, as though I haven't been doing it all this while. Ha-ha-ha.
That's it for today, tomorrow I'm going to have to update the diary that she gave me, and if i have the time, I'll try to share it up here.