"Not living up to your values"

I am not a new Eastern Health patient. This is my third admission to Eastern Health's Maroondah Campus in the past two years. I have also attended a number of appointments at different outpatient clinics. At all these encounters I have advised staff of my preferred name and sometimes seen it recorded, though different clerks have advised that the system doesn't help this. 

This admission was to the Clinical Decision Unit, arriving on a weekend morning and being discharged the following night. The first three people I encountered confirmed my preferred name, including the triage nurse (Helen - very compassionate) and clerk (Leanne - also lovely). Beyond that point, no one asked about or used my preferred name again. 

So what, you may say? Why not just tell the next person and the next?

In a two day stay, I was cared for by 10 nurses, 5 doctors and a number of other staff. Every encounter with a new person is a decision point where the following questions come up:

- will I see this person again?

- are they going to leave a break in their spiel so I can tell them my preferred name?

- if I correct them, will they react negatively? (previous experience has taught me that repeating my preferred name often leads to staff questioning why I haven't done x, y or z to sort this out and not inconvenience them in the first place)

- will correcting them change the way they care for me?

- do I have the energy to be the 'difficult patient'?

And I have to consider all of these whilst also focusing on whatever information is being asked for or shared by the staff member. I've come to hospital because I'm in pain and I'm exhausted. Going to hospital to ask for help with a chronic pain condition (migraine) is hard enough, as in my experience, it is common to feel dismissed. What proof of suffering, with no visible wound? Due to the COVID visitor restrictions, I cannot have a person with me for any support or advocacy. I try to expend my energy on trying to share and absorb vital clinical information.

When my pain did not improve, the team on the Clinical Decision Unit suggested perhaps I should just go home and rest. Maybe the pain would go away, or maybe it wouldn't. At this point, my blood pressure would drop every time I stood up. I couldn't walk to the bathroom unassisted without feeling faint and vomiting. I felt the team expressed uncertainty about what to do next, but came up with a few things to try. They said perhaps they would refer me to the EH neurology clinic after I was discharged, so I believe they obviously hadn't read my history and seen that I'm already a patient there. I told them the name of the neurologist I see. I believe they did not contact them for advice.

Eastern Health says two of their values are respect and patients first. After two days of being called the wrong name and puzzled over (but, in my opinion, not enough to read my history or call my specialist), I didn't feel respected or like I came first. I felt like just another patient to be shuttled through the process and out the door.

In this healthcare system, I believe I am privileged because I am a white, middle class, native English speaker, who has spent more than a decade working in the healthcare system. If this is how I experience what it is like to be a patient, I wonder how much more difficult must it be if you don't have what I consider to be such privileges.