For Poe Industries Health Care to provide the highest quality service to our patients, it is essential that each of us remain focused and mindful as we perform our daily responsibilities. That is why several recent reports of innapropriate texting and cell phone use by surgeons during surgery are so concerning. Distractions such as these are unsafe, undermine the quality of our work, and send a message/text to our patients that their needs are not our highest priority.
All colleagues are reminded that personal texting and cell phone use while working is not acceptable and could result in corrective action. If an urgent personal matter requires you to make a call or text during your work day, you must first text or call your supervisor to make arrangements to step away from your work with appropriate coverage. No surgical patient is to be left unattended under any circumstances due to a phone call. Similarly, psychotherapists are not to send free associated texts in the middle of sessions, although it is fine for patients to use therapy time for phone calls and texts, particularly teen-agers as this aids in establishing rapport. Please remind all your family, friends and neighbors to limit cell phone calls and texts to emergency situations involving death, natural disasters and homes burning down. They are not to use your phone as an alternative to 911.
These rules also apply to the reading of this blog.
(This is not a unique situation. See Boston Globe link "What Went Wrong?")
5 comments:
Formal reprimand is a little harsh isn't it?
Is that a text?
Ermmm... No. I sent that via e-mail in between sessions.
***Sent by Blackberry
Using my phone for 911...OH, yeah. Most folks tried, despite my standard opening-session speech. Your job is terribly hard.
Thanks, Nance. Today was a particularly bad one, trying to hospitalize an adolescent in the E.R. with two patients in my waiting room. I thought my head would explode. I love the typical bullshit around people and their phones: pretending they aren't answering but just checking but then they have to take it for a minute and they get into a whole conversation and I'm just sitting their like chopped liver. It's their therapy time, but it's so incredibly insulting to be treated like the servant class. Adolescents are another story. They're just testing, and mostly secretly texting throughout the entire session with those fingers flying a mile a minute while they are making total eye contact with me the whole time. I tease them about it and make them disclose to me the content until they stop.
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