Patient 'X'

Over the past few placements one recurring problem has continually cropped up for me. I have a real problem remembering patient names. This might sound like a simple enough issue but it even when you’ve got the right diagnosis and the right treatment a few more problems seem to crop up:
1) It’s a struggle to develop rapport with a patient if you have to keep referring to them as ‘you.’
2) When a doctor asks you a question about a patient and you don’t know which patient they are talking about you look like a fool.
3) When your supervisor asks you to treat a list of patient and you have to look up their files to remember them, it wastes a lot of time.
4) It’s definitely not a confidence booster when you’re talking to a patient only to realise that you’ve already forgotten their name.

This isn’t a new problem either. Each semester when it came time for OSPE’s I would write on my palm the name of the patient so that if I could refer to the patient by name.

I know that there are a lot of tricks that you can use to help remember names. A quick google search of ‘tricks to remembering names’ found the following: Be interested (I hope that I am), Verify it (patient files- easy enough), Picture it written on their forehead (apparently Franklin Roosevelt used this trick to good effect), Imagine writing the name (related to motor programming memory- should work well for physios), Use word associations (remember a patient named Arnold by associating them with the terminator), Use it frequently (hello Mr ‘X’, how are you doing Mr ‘X’) and Record the name (I think most students would agree that we seem to be doing enough of this already.)

I’ve put quite a bit of thought into how best to deal with this problem and already have done a number of things to try and improve it. Every time before I enter a patients room I check on the ward list to make sure their name is firmly in my head. When I forget the name during treatment I pretend to make a note on my page and have a quick look at the name. I try to use their name as much as possible to make sure it’s in my long term memory banks.

But you know what? I think the real answer is that like everything else, it just takes practice. After the first couple of weeks of a placement everything becomes a bit more familiar and instead of having to think about exactly how to handle this drain and what question to ask before standing someone up, it just happens and you can spend more time considering the patient rather than the condition. Somehow it all seems to work. So I guess in the future I’ll keep doing what I am doing and let time, practice and confidence fill in the blanks with my ailing memory.