Doctor Patient Relations

Fire that Patient! Recognize When to Cut Losses

By Laurie Sorrenson, OD, FAAO

Our office really bends over backwards to please patients. We make home deliveries, send flowers, work people in and even provide e-mail access to staff and doctors. But sometimes we get a patient who we think we are never going to be able to make happy long term.

Rather beat ourselves up over our failure to please them, or risk damaging staff morale, we consider firing that patient. I bring together all the staff members who have dealt with the patient and ask them if they are ready to fire the patient or whether we want to give them another chance. The majority of the time the staff votes to give them another chance. It is when a patient is unhappy AND disrespectful that they tend to come down on the side of firing the patient. This only happens once every year or two at the most.

At that point, Iwrite a letter along the lines of: “I know you are unhappy with our services (or whatever), and I think it is best if you seek your eyecare services elsewhere. I have enclosed all of your records and a check for the money you spent in our office.” A lot of ODs say you need to offer emergency care for a certain length of time so you are not accused of abandonment.If you can continue offering emergency care to the patient you have let go, consider doing it. I don’t do that as I have probably five optometric offices within a 10-minute drive of my office, so there is plenty of eyecare available all around me. I think that as long as you are generous with a refund and are not defensive, you are not going to have any problems.

We take asking a patient to leave our practice very seriously, but we also take staff morale and maintaining a respectful workplace seriously. If a patient is repeatedly disrespectful to your staff, it may do more harm than good to continue seeing them. It isn’t worth making your staff suffer for a patient you have no hope of pleasing. I would rather focus on the patients we can help.

How does your office handle abusive patients you know will never be happy? Is there a point when you ask them to leave your practice?

Laurie Sorrenson, OD, FAAO, is president of Lakeline Vision Source in Austin, Texas. To contact her: sorrenson@att.net.

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