ARE YOUR PATIENTS recording you without your knowledge? And if so, how do you handle it?
Chalk it up to the pandemic and the political-medical disagreements that it fostered, but Naznin Jamal, MD, now feels that “the atmosphere has become a bit more hostile to medical staff in general. I believe that’s more true for nurses, they bear the brunt of it. But it’s also true for physicians as well.”
“I will allow patients to put someone on a speakerphone, usually a family member or caregiver.”
Naznin Jamal, MD
Jefferson Regional Medical Center
The end of the pandemic has lessened that hostility a bit, “but it’s still not the way that it used to be 10 years ago, when people were more respectful,” says Dr. Jamal, hospitalist medical director at Jefferson Regional Medical Center in Pine Bluff, Ark. “There’s just a lot of mistrust.”
As an example, she mentions the instances where she and her colleagues find that patients or families are surreptitiously recording them, either with audio or video. In the one instance where she found herself being recorded, Dr. Jamal says she told the patient and family that they didn’t have her consent.
“But what I will do is allow them to put someone on a speakerphone, usually a family member or caregiver,” says Dr. Jamal. “That gives them one more person who has a chance to ask me questions, and it allows a patient or family to pull in another decision-maker.” At the same time, she points out, “that respects my autonomy.”
