That Guy

As I've previously said I'm one of the few males at my job - the only other being the physician.

Everyday the nursing staff takes lots of phone calls attempting to answer any question, relaying messages from providers, calling in prescriptions, etc. With so many calls being made, which often involve lots of people, mistakes are bound to happen. I'm not talking about life threatening mistakes. Mistakes like telling a patient a prescription was mailed to their house, and it never really getting done.

This happen to me today. Last Saturday a patient called saying they left a prescription at the office and wanted to know what they should do about it since they only have a 7 day window to fill the prescription. I hadn't worked that Saturday and asked the staff what was going on. I was told that the prescription had been mailed to her house and that she should keep her eyes peeled.

Today that patient came into the office. But first there were a number of messages from her saying she never got the prescription in the mail like the guy told her. So she came into the office, we updated her registration and she was given a new prescription. Of course she had to go on a little rant how the guy had told her that everything had been taken care of and that she saw the guy walking around the office today.

We get the point. You spoke to me and the information I provided you with was faulty.

This clearly was not my fault. Many times the faulty information we give patients is a pure accident and most of the time it doesn't come back to bite people in the ass because if the patient hears a female's voice they don't bother trying to place it. But when they hear a male voice, all of a sudden they make a mental note about it. So often patients call saying, "I spoke that THAT GUY and he told me..." This sucks cause anything I do wrong ALWAYS comes back to me, whereas if one of my female counterparts makes the same mistake it disappears.

Even patients that I've never met before know who I am. Everyone recognizes the 6'4'' male nurse in the office. When I introduce myself to new patients they often say, "Oh yeah I've seen you around the office before." Are people checking me out? Or is it simply because I'm the guy nurse? God knows the patients can easily talk about me outside of the office.

On the plus side any nice things that people want to say are easily traced back to me, which I think is more often the case. We have a little survey on the back of the check-out sheets asking patients to rate our performance. Patients rarely ever write negative things, but patients can easily write in who their nurse was because when they ask the front desk who that guy was, there's only me.