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One Significant Way to Lower Healthcare Costs: Listen to Patients (Especially, Women)
When patients’ complaints are not taken seriously or in a timely manner, it causes untold suffering. It’s also an inefficient use of hospital resources and healthcare dollars. We need to do better — doctors need to do better. Nurses can, should, and have stepped up for patients too ill to self-advocate. But we could save a lot of time and money if doctors were educated in medical school to “listen to the patient,” regardless of gender, color, sexual orientation, cultural background, or socioeconomic status.
Patients must come first. By sticking to this simple rule, patients and the hospitals that treat them will also save money.
Much has been written about gender-bias in healthcare — and based on my twenty-five years as a medical professional, I’m here to tell you it’s real. In all my years as a nurse, I have never had a doctor order a psych consult on a male patient being admitted with physical illness — only on male patients admitted for a suicide watch or a substance-abuse issue. But I can’t count the number of times a physician has ordered a psych consult on a female patient being admitted with physical illness. In lieu of investigating and ordering tests, if the source of the patient’s complaints was not immediately obvious, out would come the “ego-protection strategy”…
