So far, I have been pretty lucky with patient’s actually showing up on time for appointments. Most of them have been making all payments as well, so yea – good fortune. I have had a few patients’ cancel their appointments but they have always done so at least a day in advance. True it isn’t always enough time for me to fill the spot, but at least I have a chance.
So today, of all days I had my first patient failure. This equates to the patient not showing up, not calling, and you simply can’t get a hold of them to find out why. I was going to do one of my performance exams on this patient so I am justifiably pissed. Not only did I waste my afternoon (which costs about 150 in tuition), but I have to find a new patient to do the PE on. School policy is that I can dismiss this patient because she failed the initial exam (normally we have a 2-strike policy after they have been coming for awhile).
I am at a crossroads. This patient cancelled the previous initial exam last week but called the day before. She also made her own FMX appointment and got the x-rays taken without me having to do anything. So I don’t quite understand how to take the situation.
If she doesn’t call back by tomorrow, I will most likely dismiss her as a patient. Just sucks that I was all ready to get some requirements out of the way and now am back at square one. On the plus side, I have scheduled a transfer patient for an appointment who is a veritable gold mine of directs and crowns. So I will finally get some consistent operative experience.
Funny side note:
We are required to call our pedo patients the day prior to our rotations. I have pedo on Friday..hence calling on Thursday. We don’t have to actually schedule them, we just verify that the scheduled patient still plans on coming. Well, it seems that 2 out of every three kids I get does not speak English. I don’t speak Spanish. So when I call and mom answers with: bueno, I naturally get a bit off guard. I totally half-assed my way through, and she seemed to understand. Needless to say, my classmates around the phone area were laughing their asses off. Get your jollies now people, it will happen to you to.
