I have seen quite a few posts on this forum where people are asking about follow-up appointments or saying they have been left high and dry or variants thereof.
This has always puzzled me a little as I can’t help wondering why it is expected for the doctor or hospital to follow-up.
I thought I would try an analogy. I’ll use myself as an example, but I expect I am not the only one who drove an old car. In fact, I am not sure why I am saying old car, it could be any car since we all know, do we not that a car, any car will break down or require repairs at some time during its lifetime.
In my time I have had eight cars. A couple of these were brand new with only delivery mileage. The thing is in all the time I had these cars, no garage or the dealership that sold me the car ever asked me to take the car in for service. It was always up to me to make sure the car was serviced on time and if I missed the service I had to accept the consequences. It didn’t matter whether it was under warranty or post warranty, I booked the service or it didn’t happen.
My car mechanic never called me or asked me to take my car in. He may have said come back in six months or a year, or the service manual may have suggested an interval, but that was it. Also, even when it had been serviced, I was usually the one ringing up to find out if it was ready!
For me, my health is no different. What I have seen is that in the case of strokes, once the hospital declares you medically fit, you are discharged and there are on occasions ongoing care instructions to the GP or district nurses etc. But, I personally have never seen any “follow-on” or “routine” checks and so if I have had any follow-on appointments it’s because they were initiated by me or I broke down and ended up being taken to A&E.
Do I expect the healthcare profession to make appointments for me? No, I don’t.
If I am lucky they might send a reminder to make an appointment for something I don’t need or want e.g.a flu jab or a diabetic test, but nothing else. OK, that’s not strictly true. I do get invited to send a stool sample every two years so they can check if I have bowel cancer.
I am not sure if it is just me, but I find if I need something checking or doing, I invariably have to initiate it.
The most recent example of this is a “follow-on” check for my Mum.
Again, they discharged Mum in December and put her on life long meds.
Sorry, we don’t want that so after 8 weeks (end of first course of meds), we checked with the GP and they were blissfully unaware or concerned. They were happy to prescribe more meds but nothing about if they were working, if there were side effects etc.
So we said we want to stop them for x, y, z reasons.
This resulted in a “high-priority” referral back to the hospital.
I am not suggesting this is the way to do things, but it’s how I/we do it. Does it aways get results? No - as you might just join a queue and again get forgotten. So we do a follow-up to the follow-up.
As at the time of writing we are still waiting for the appointment …
Namaste|
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