Thick skin: how not to take patient feedback personally

The power of the innocent bystander

True story: like many pharmacy settings, Anthony’s pharmacy shares a parking lot with the walk-in-clinic next door. Unpredictably for him, this fact proved to be of unfortunate disadvantage.

A patient, who had a long history of opioid abuse despite much support from his healthcare team, visited the physician next door for a pain follow-up and was denied his request for an early opioid release.

Naturally, the patient approached the pharmacy with the same request only to be justifiably denied once more. That was the straw that broke the camel’s back and a patient rant ensued toward the pharmacist, who was the last person in his path:

“You guys don’t care. I’m only two days early and you can give it out early, you just don’t like me. What am I supposed to do now? I guess I’ll just go get it off the street. You guys only care about money. You shouldn’t have a licence.”

Then he stormed out of the pharmacy (insert profanity here), got into his car, intentionally backing it up into the nicest car in the parking lot, assuming it was the physician’s, but was actually the pharmacist’s.

The pharmacist was an innocent bystander yet bore the burden of name calling, words against his character and car damage. This was enough to ruin anyone’s day but Anthony left the interaction without being fazed and without losing sleep that night.

How?

In the way he responded just before the patient stormed out.   

After the rant, Anthony replied: “I’m sorry you feel this way and wish I could do more. I’ll have to direct you to emergency where your pain can be assessed further.”

Anthony maintained the innocent bystander position. He did not allow the comments to be taken personally and resisted the urge to let the patient attack his character by not responding directly to each of the patient’s remarks.

He stayed focused on the task, instead of on the person. He realized that he could not control how the patient got into his situation, could not offer help beyond pointing him where to seek further medical help, and refused to allow the patient to play the victim.

Maintaining innocence is the key to not taking it personally

We can maintain innocence by avoiding going down the conversation’s rabbit holes that act like tangents of quicksand, impossible for us to get out. Know that the patient will always have a response, so engaging them in a battle only makes us vulnerable to further attack. It does us no good, nor the patient. We have to be comfortable allowing them to leave the situation thinking they won.

As part of the duties of being a pharmacist, our job involves helping people when they are not at their best. Empathetically recognizing that they carry burdens with their visits to see us is the first step to being the helper (as bystander) instead of a combatant fighting against them. They do not necessarily mean to fight us, but we are just sometimes in their way. It is our job to recognize that and manage it. 

The only way we can help people is by adopting the innocent bystander approach and staying out of the battle. We can only be part of the solution by avoiding becoming part of the problem. Stay innocent, dodge rabbit holes, resist playing the victim, focus on task over person, allow them to walk away thinking they won and most of all, be careful where you park your car!

For further examples and insight, see the Guide to Dealing with Patient Feedback within my RxMIND bundle, a collection of mindset tools for pharmacists available here.

This topic and more are discussed in Cascade: a pharmacist mastermind, where pharmacists gather in a 6-week virtual meeting series to set up solutions to everyday pharmacy problems, apply here for the next cycle.