Getting Ready for your Family Doctor’s Appointment

Featuring Dr. Daniel Ngui, BSc (P.T), MD, CFPC, FCFP, Family Physician Getting Ready for your Family Doctor’s Appointment Duration: 3 minutes, 6 seconds

It's important to know that your family doctor, your specialist in family medicine is doing their best to deal with urgent issues with managing chronic diseases as well as managing a roster of patients in their practice.

When trying to book with your family doctor, it's important that no-shows can affect your relationship with your family doctor. It can affect your care that you receive one on one in terms of continuity and making sure you follow up and finally it's important to understand that no-shows affect the long term sustainability of doctors' offices.

Some tips to book with family doctors include the fact that we all want to provide the ideal care at the right time. There are many different types of appointments that one could use.

One could ask for a fit-in appointment which is typically five to ten minutes long. One could ask for a regular appointment where you have the leisurely time to go over topics comprehensively from 10 to 15 minutes of time.

Your doctor may ask you for a chronic disease review which is typically longer anywhere from 15 minutes to 30 minutes in time to do complex care planning on an annual basis or annual chronic disease reviews on an annual basis.

Finally, you can access your doctor by phoning your doctor about urgent issues or issues that could save an office visit, by emailing your doctor with secure email, and in the future, video conferencing with your physician will be very important in terms of trying to improve access and save a face-to-face visit if possible.

There are different things a family doctor may try to try to optimize your follow-up. Online and patient reminder systems and patient portals that are connected to your doctor's electronic medical record system may optimize and maximize your follow-up.

You'll be able to when registering get a email reminder, perhaps a text reminder or even a phone call reminding about the importance of taking medications, of assessing how you're doing with self-rated scales, and even perhaps providing you some informational videos that might help you understand the importance of adherence and following up with your family doctor.

It's important that you understand as patients that the best way to cultivate your long term relationship with your family doctor or healthcare provider is to show up on time, to be prepared, to have a list of your medications, a list of questions that can be realistically addressed within the appointment, how to book, how to follow up so if you're not sure about what are ways to optimize your doctor patient relationship, simply go and speak to your family doctor.

If you have questions about how to use these new techniques for booking, simply talk to your medical office assistant about online, email requests, online booking, telephone appointments and video conferencing. These are techniques that will make the most of your doctor patient relationship.

Presenter: Dr. Daniel Ngui, Family Doctor, Vancouver, BC

Local Practitioners: Family Doctor