My mum and dad are down this week visiting for a week.
Wonderful to see them and wonderful to have the chats and the arguments about Scottish politics or philosophy or the difference between the generations.
The discussion at the table tonight in one way or another bizarrely turned around to video consultations to protect patients. At the start of the conversation my mum thought it was a good idea that consultations should be videoed and then the videos should be given to the patient as soon as they left the consultation room as proof that things went exactly as they thought they did.
What do we think of that?
To me this is the end of the contract. Patients who want to video me talking to them are accepting that I will become mechanical and robotic. I will never stray off the line, I will not be warm and empathic because I will fear that will be interpreted as manipulative. I will stick straight down the line and nothing outside of that.
No, I think not! I think video consultations may be the one thing that would make me retire. Sadly though I think we’re only one step away from this and I believe we’ll probably head to a situation where patients will be allowed to choose whether their consultations are videoed or not and then we’ll only be in a situation where any interaction with the patient will have to be recorded and stored; kept for seven years but not longer than seven years and then destroyed immediately should the patient ask us to do so. But at it’s very basic level what does this say about the Dr (dentist) / patient relationship? It says that nobody trusts anybody anymore.
When the trust in healthcare is gone it’s probably time to give up and therefore when someone asks me to start videoing my consultations because they don’t trust me, it will indeed be time to stop.
Blog Post Number - 1265