My appraiser has sent me an email
full of positive suggestions. It's time, he suggests, I stopped fiddling with
the QOF data and thought about a personal patient satisfaction survey. I'll
need two in my five year revalidation folder - so there's no time like the
present.
I decide I'll do this. Some
patients must like me, since they keep coming back. The ones that don't like me
go elsewhere, so there is already a self congratulatory glow around booked
surgeries. This could work well for me. I confer with Sally the locum, who has
been trialling the eportfolio and is thus a Revalidation Guru.
Sally points out that if I only
question the patients who choose to see me, then when they hate me I will cry.
She advises me to strike out into the unknown realms of Patients who Have no
Choice. At least then I am free to make excuses for the results. It's easy for
her to say. Sally has built up a file of the kind of glowing testimonials and
cards with care bears on them that those of us who run the duty clinic on Monday
afternoons (forty five patients, one doctor) cannot hope to emulate.
Still, I give it a go, and I print
off the CARE questionnaire from the RCGP website. Then I plough on
through the Armageddon-style afternoon with a beatific smile, since it seems to
me that being nicer than normal because I'm running a survey is not REALLY
ethically unsound. I smile even when Mr Fester wants me to feel his armpit, and
by the time we reach eight o'clock I have the kind of Botox face we're
accustomed to seeing only on TV and in wind tunnels.
I arrive home after two late visits
to a row about washing up which is only compounded by my wafting, Zen like,
into the eye of the storm and asking them how it makes them all FEEL and what
they hoped I might DO ABOUT IT.
So how did it go? It's not a
competition, Sally points out when I try to compare notes regarding about the
number of patients who I forced, through sickening niceness levels, into
ticking the ‘the doctor left me understanding more about my condition' box.
There isn't a pass mark, I'm meant to reflect on it, and grow. Man, says my
son, reading this over my shoulder. You're going to be enormous.