Grump

Yesterday I went into work an hour early with the intention of catching up on phone calls. I had a lot of lab results and surgical estimates to discuss with clients.

OF COURSE then the phone rings - new client, dog got into a fight and sustained bite wounds, could we see them? Receptionist asks Dr. Bosses (one in surgery and one in appointments) and they say that we can probably have one of us work them in - perhaps me.

My heart sank. I told the receptionist that I could see the dog if no one else could but that I would really prefer to catch up on everything that I was behind on. You see, I don't have access to our computer system from home and so all my callbacks and records writing has to happen at work. I didn't want to stay late to do it or call people at 8:30 pm, so stupid me thought it would be a good idea to come in early.

Guess who saw the emergency. Guess who became 30 full minutes behind as a result and ended up apologizing to people the rest of the day for being behind.

To make things even more fun challenging, we had:
- A fully booked appointment schedule
- 2 dentals and 3 surgeries (dentals take up 2 techs and surgeries take 1, thus tying up about 50% of our techs all day)
- 2 other urgent care appointments earlier in the morning
- 2 ultrasounds (those took up the remaining 50% of the techs)
- 1 tech out with a sick kid

Net result: I had NO help with my first few appointments after that emergency.

I ended up being fairly grouchy and having to mentally check myself from biting people's heads off. I failed one time unfortunately and then felt horrible because that is how I felt and acted ALL THE TIME at the corporate practice.

There are certainly some efficiency things I can work on, such as completing more of the records in the exam room and maybe calling people back at night if necessary. However, I also think we had far too many procedures booked for the number of techs we had. When Dr. Boss is cleaning exam rooms and restraining animals we are definitely short on support staff.*

One of the challenges that I face with completing the records in the exam room is that the main tech I work with is slooooow on the computer and regularly makes errors, so I've lost trust in her being able to do any of my records or charges. How do you help coach someone to get better when you don't have the time to do so? Other techs are really good about entering charges and entering history and treatment plan into my records so I only have to complete the physical exam and assessment portions. With this other tech the history becomes a verbatim transcript of what the client said in run-on-sentence form (so it's unreadable) and it's a rare time when either a charge or a prescription direction or both are incorrect.



*Note: I am absolutely NOT saying that doctors are above doing tech work. It's just that when a doctor does tech work you are spending more money to get the same job done - AND you are taking away from time that could be spent making diagnoses and coming up with treatment plans.