Meet the children in a safe space!
The place of the first contact is very relevant because there is a difference between meeting a child in the waiting area or meeting in the consultation room.
Your choice of place makes all the difference!
You might remember, me writing in an earlier post: Your examination room is their dungeon!
Often the consultation room is designed for maximal efficiency, focussing on the needs of the doctor: clean, straight, and sterile. There are frequently instruments visible that might be used during the examination.
In essence, the consultation room looks like a dungeon, a place where strange and possibly painful things are going to happen.
Why might we choose to meet in the examination room?
Time is money, so they say. The outpatient clinics are typically quite fully booked, and we try to squeeze in as many patients as we can.
This situation might trigger us, to send someone in our place to get the patient to the examination room. The goal is simply to “safe” our time.
When we use any automated patient-calling system or a registrar or nurse to guide the patient to the examination room, we have sent a message.
And the message is:
- You are not important, but I am.
- You need to come to me, and I don’t need to make that effort.
The aim is to “safe” some time, the effect is, that we trigger fear. Why? Because in this setting, the child (and parent) come with increasing anxiety towards the examination room. And to them, the examination room looks like … a dungeon. And logically, we are the dungeon-master, not a friend.
What do we know about dungeons?
- Dungeons trigger fear
- You don’t like surprises in a dungeon
- You don’t make friends in a dungeon
With an anxious and nervous mindset, it is almost the default response, that for the paediatric patient everything in this place looks frightening and scary. This is not the environment where we want to make a new “friend”. Most likely, the child will try to hide and to avoid any contact.
What is the alternative?
The waiting area of a surgery, on the other hand, has nowadays at least some child-friendly aspects. Here, a child has the chance to play while waiting. The child often has had some time (while waiting) to get used to this space. Therefore, the waiting area is perceived by them as “nice” and “safe”. Meeting someone new here triggers an entirely different baseline atmosphere to the encounter. Meet the children in a safe space!
With the time invested (about 7 seconds are sufficient) in the optimal setting, the rest of the consultation goes with cooperation and frequently way more efficient, than when the child kicks and screams out of fear.
The choice is a no-brainer!
When the waiting area is “safe” and the examination room is “dangerous”, the first encounter between the doctor and the child should take place in the “safe area”. Otherwise, the child links the danger of the room with the “dangerous” person called the doctor. Be aware, nobody makes friends in a dungeon.
In a nutshell:
Meet the children in a safe space! Only here can we connect.
Communication lives on comments … fancy to share yours?