Virtual Medicine (or only when I larf!)
Most People , including many physicians are overwhelmed at the innovation and efficiency of Virtual Health-Care. They see it as a New, Original and Economical way of delivering health care in many situations. They wonder at the efficiency of the high tech world and how much more convenient it is to discuss your problem on the phone or some video device than to wait to get an appointment or to sit in some crowded emergency room for some minor ailment that does not require hospital space or facilities in the first place.You maybe surprised to hear that virtual health care was more universally available and more efficiently practiced when I first qualified (long, long ago) than it is now. In addition, it cost nothing! (to anyone other than the health care provider.)
And all you needed was a telephone.
The great difference is that my generation of general practitioners carried their responsibilities on their back.
When my patients phoned me, they got a call back. They rarely got an answering machine Each evening I (and many like me) left the office with a pocketful of telephone numbers scribbled on our prescription pads because that was the closest scribbling paper - these were the non urgent calls that we could make after supper. The possibly urgent ones got the call back from their doctor or the substitute with whom he had arranged a cover roster. Twenty four hours a day, three hundred and sixty five days a year coverage . If you couldn't provide coverage, then you cancelled your plans.. That's why solo practitioners formed into groups, so that they could have some life to spend with their family and friends.
My patients never got today's standard recorded message "if this is an emergency, hang up and call 911." Just prior to my retiring at the age of 78, the telephone service had become so effective at avoiding communication that I often found it difficult to get through to my own Nurse! Not her fault, the fault of the 'high tech idiots (Technodopes?) who devised systems so efficient to stop patients being able to get through to their Physician that doctors frequently could not even get through to their nurse!! They easily sold the software to the Docs. They, of course, assured the Docs, that it would improve medical care and the docs wanted to believe it.
I have always recognized the vital contribution that 'high tech' makes to medicine. I am well aware that I owe my own survival to it. I am not a Luddite, I don't want to escape to the past, because, having lived in the 'old days', I could tell you some stories to easily explain why neither I nor most people I know want to return there. Even though we may wax nostalgic about them at times. We live a lot better than previous generations due to high technology.
Let me complete the picture of just how much 'virtual care' there was. Most of the GPs I knew came home at night, connected briefly with their family and after dinner took the wad of phone calls from patients anxiously awaiting a call-back down to their office in the basement and spent anything from minutes to hours practicing 'Virtual Medicine' on their telephones caring for their patients. Most of the time when the phone rang throughout the day or the night, the doctor or his wife answered it.
Would you like to know what we got paid for that service?? Nothing. Let me repeat that. NOTHING! Did we resent that? Unbelievably, we didn't. We regarded that as part of duty , part of responsibility, part of what being a physician was.
Maybe doctors weren't so smart then. Or maybe it was just that medicine then was a vocation, not just a technical skill.
And they think Virtual Medicine is something new!!
Does it hurt? Only when I laugh!
My patients never got today's standard recorded message "if this is an emergency, hang up and call 911." Just prior to my retiring at the age of 78, the telephone service had become so effective at avoiding communication that I often found it difficult to get through to my own Nurse! Not her fault, the fault of the 'high tech idiots (Technodopes?) who devised systems so efficient to stop patients being able to get through to their Physician that doctors frequently could not even get through to their nurse!! They easily sold the software to the Docs. They, of course, assured the Docs, that it would improve medical care and the docs wanted to believe it.
I have always recognized the vital contribution that 'high tech' makes to medicine. I am well aware that I owe my own survival to it. I am not a Luddite, I don't want to escape to the past, because, having lived in the 'old days', I could tell you some stories to easily explain why neither I nor most people I know want to return there. Even though we may wax nostalgic about them at times. We live a lot better than previous generations due to high technology.
Let me complete the picture of just how much 'virtual care' there was. Most of the GPs I knew came home at night, connected briefly with their family and after dinner took the wad of phone calls from patients anxiously awaiting a call-back down to their office in the basement and spent anything from minutes to hours practicing 'Virtual Medicine' on their telephones caring for their patients. Most of the time when the phone rang throughout the day or the night, the doctor or his wife answered it.
Would you like to know what we got paid for that service?? Nothing. Let me repeat that. NOTHING! Did we resent that? Unbelievably, we didn't. We regarded that as part of duty , part of responsibility, part of what being a physician was.
Maybe doctors weren't so smart then. Or maybe it was just that medicine then was a vocation, not just a technical skill.
And they think Virtual Medicine is something new!!
Does it hurt? Only when I laugh!
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