Think I just experienced ‘old me’…It wasn’t pleasant 😔

I keep rescue chooks from battery farms & recently two have been quite sick – so I sought the advice of the all-knowing & all-round extraordinary Mother Clucker who heads up this organisation. Up and down the highway I went, to their chook HQ & quasi-hospital. Every time I returned with more vials of powders, pills, emulsions, tubing to get the goods into their guts directly, stern instructions about the need to separate them out, both from the flock & each other (one is currently housed in a half wine barrel!), monitor how much water they’re consuming, observe their poos, palpate some part of chook anatomy called a crop (I had to google it) & be ready to report back every detail… and tbh my brain blanketed with post-it notes. But I also left each time inspired, incredibly motivated by the all-knowing Mother Clucker, committed to doing the best for my little ex-battery battlers.

But the execution…ai y iyi! It’s a full-time job…on top of my full-time job. And only one of these feeds me because my gals are all living out their best retirement at my place. Oh, and then there’s my other pets, my plants, my domestics & gosh I really do need to fit in sleep at some stage! I wanted to scream, ‘Hey Mother-Clucker! Chook-care is not the only thing I got going on over here!!’ Inevitably I falter then fail & then am riddled with remorse about it. Another visit…another injection of information overload, I come home re-committed & the cycle starts again.

But suddenly it dawned on me that this is perhaps how some of my patients felt in the past

So, let me ask you, who are you as a clinician now compared to who you were when you first graduated? After you’d been out in practice a while? Or even more recently than that, say, before the ‘big P’ changed all our practice realities? I was a boss lady.

My big asks of everyone, my patients, my colleagues & certainly myself, came from a good place, of course. I was a fountain of knowledge, capable of ‘fixing’ them, if they took my advice, all my advice, on board.

Often of course, just like me, they failed & then (worse yet) felt bad about themselves. They imagined themselves to be at fault, but I was. I was asking too much. Overloading them with info, expecting they had a truly remarkable capacity for change, beyond what behavioural science suggests is likely and that nothing else in their lives would get in the way of this prescription. As a clinician some lessons are giant quantum leaps, but many are more like microdosing, it takes a long time of incremental insights but only after you’ve hit some threshold do you make the change and for me this was one of those.

But once you learn this lesson: the need to meet our patients where they are, individualise treatment to their readiness for change, co-create the prescription with them so they are already increasing the odds of its success, etc. Well, you’ll never be so hard on any human (including yourself) hopefully ever again.

Compliance Changers – Strategies for Success

At the end of an information & insight heavy appointment, formulating a list of products and doses for our patients to take can feel like a bit of a ‘tada moment’, like a magician pulling a rabbit out of the hat.  “Here is the solution – now off you go!”  Research tells us, however, that treatment-plans that are a co-creation between you and your patient – evolving from a discussion that not only allows them a voice, but a major role in the decision making – are far more likely to succeed. While we are the authority on our medicines, our patients are the authority on what makes them tick & what’s likely to succeed, in terms of taste, texture, temperature & timing!  This is called Patient Centred Prescribing and together with some other tips tricks and hacks I share with you in this episode, can really increase patient buy-in, compliance and therefore bring your treatment plan to fruition and fulfilment!