My non-market business environment class tonight is talking about how companies respond to bad publicity, which can be driven by either the media or by special interest groups.
During the discussion, one of my classmates talked about a friend of his who is a doctor. The doctor had told him that when malpractice suits are filed, the determining factor is usually the doctor’s interpersonal skills rather than his medical skills. In other words, the incompetent doctors who are really nice guys tend to be safe, while the very good doctors who rub people the wrong way tend to get hit by lawsuits.
I think there’s something very fundamentally human and very wrong with that. However, I also think that it’s important to understand that conversational skills can be just as important as technical skills when it comes to your professional work, no matter what industry you’re in.
I am of the belief that we have put the medical professionals on an impossibly high and shaky pedestal.
In my experience, they rarely seem to know what’s wrong, it’s just process of elimination and hope the patient gets better before he dies.
I’ll hold my nice C-section surgeons an exception – of course, they know what’s wrong (a big fat baby is stuck in my uterus and the exit is insufficient) and they have oodles of experience rectifying the situation (get something sharp and cut the sucker out).
Most of the time, we either get better or we die. Actually, always, eventually, we die. People don’t like death very well and like to blame someone. Sometimes doctors really do mess up, even so .. I’m just too much of a fatalist or whatever you call it when a person thinks whatever happens was meant to happen.
The “test” isn’t so much what happens to you, but how you deal with it. Am I anywhere near on-topic still? No? Never was? Sorry. I’ll stop.
Yeah, medicine is a funny thing, and so is getting sick. Except when you are, then it isn’t.
Heather woke me up around 4:00-ish AM on Saturday to let me know that it was time to go to the midwife clinic. I called Suzi, Heather’s midwife, and told her we were on our way.
When we got there at 5:00, Suzi and a few midwives-in-training were getting things ready. I wasn’t especially impressed with Suzi’s bedside manner, and my first impression was negative. However, as I watched her work, I saw that she is really very good.
(Later I found out that she had been working for like two days straight. When I reflected on how my own bedside manner might be after two days with little sleep, I became a lot more sympathetic.)
My point being that, it’s easy to judge things we do understand (communication styles) than things we don’t understand (technical medical procedures). Since we don’t like to feel dumb, and we want the world to make sense, we are predisposed to judge something, and so we judge based on the less relevant, more accessible metric than the relevant but technical metric.
Great insights. Thanks for sharing. Studies of patient satisfaction in the ER show waiting time to be the primary factor in determining competence of medical/nursing staff. Oh, to be so randomly incompetent!
Wait time. That’s interesting. I guess punctuality really is important.
Malcolm Gladwell’s book _Blink_, which I’ve been trying to get you to read, talks about that very phenomenon with doctors getting sued according to their people skills rather than their technical competence.
Speaking of which, I did finally finish Tipping Point. I think next on my list is book three of the Mistborn series.