A disco ball. It’s that simple.
Professor Candid has heard the question asked, and has his answer ready.
Gratitude
Out of the goodness of your heart you’ve agreed to see six members of the same family who have all piled into a single 15-minute appointment and you’ve just spent your lunch break filling out a wad of NDIS forms because your patient forgot that their submission deadline was tomorrow.
Do you think you’ll get so much as a thank you?
Dream on.
An infallible memory
Patients expect you to remember every detail about their health and wouldn’t it be nice if you could remember the name of the little round tablets they take every morning or what their biopsy results showed from five years ago.
You have a problem remembering what you had for lunch let alone which structures form the posterior wall of the inguinal canal.
Oh, that’s right, you didn’t have lunch.
Clear guidelines
Having guidelines that are clear, concise and readable would be a godsend.
Instead you’ve got a redback’s web of chaotically inter-related arrows and a giant killer arachnid sat waiting for you in the middle.
A day without risk
Imagine a day when you know exactly what the diagnosis is, you know precisely which box to tick and you’re completely confident that the octogenarian sat in front of you with his “funny turns” is safe to own a gun licence.
You throw open the windows to allow a flock of Disney-esque cartoon birds to fly in and alight on your outstretched arms, only to be rudely awoken by someone telling you that you need to redo their NDIS forms and that there’ll be at least another eight-month wait before the 80-year-old can see a neurologist.
Update download
Elon Musk really needs to get his finger out and start doing some work.
You’ll be practically retired before he invents a downloadable brain implant which will keep you updated and satisfy all of those pesky CPD requirements.
Honesty
It’s not much to ask for is it, but a bit of honesty from patients wouldn’t go amiss.
What’s that? You want to be “checked for parasites” because you spend your life neurotically scrolling through Facebook?
What’s that? The real reason your TSH is sky high is because you keep forgetting to take your thyroxine tablets?
And what’s that? You’ve put on 10kg because you eat bucketloads of pig swill every evening and not because you’ve got a fancy autoimmune condition?
How refreshing to hear!
Mental health
Just once the community mental health team could agree to see one of your patients.
How is a recurrently self-harming, over-dosing borderline patient with a well-documented history of psychotic episodes and generalised anxiety not suitable for the mental health team?
Disco room
All GPs secretly want a disco room in their practice where they can go to forget all about referral rejections and NDIS misery and just kick back and listen to Franz Ferdinand’s Take Me Out and I Bet You Look Good On The Dancefloor by the Arctic Monkeys.
