One of those families

Most families are very nice and appropriately concerned for their loved one. But sometimes you get a family that is unhappy with everything. The second you walk in the door there are problems. "We don't like this...We don't like that...We don't know anything...We don't know why this...We want this...We need that, or else..." Sometimes there truly is a reason for all the gripes. Recently we had a patient that was transferred from another hospital, and the transferring hospital made a whole bunch of promises about what and how we were going to do things, some of which were not even possible. I was under fire the second I walked in the door. Then, as I listened more, I also realized many of the problems actually occurred at the other hospital. Wounds weren't cleaned there, there was a delay in treatment there, they were "forced" to transfer from there...and that carried over to us. "Why haven't we been seen by so-and-so? That team didn't even know about us until this morning. Why hasn't he been to surgery?" After a good hour of explanations and troubleshooting, we started to see eye-to-eye.

Fresh off that family, I got a new one. Not a transfer this time, though. They don't want these surgeons, they don't want residents, and they want everything NOW. Although I consider myself very good with patients and families, I have learned there are some cases where you can never make a family happy. You can't make enough accommodations, say enough nice things, jump through enough hoops to make them happy. Maybe some people are just predisposed to being angry everywhere they go. Maybe it's the stress of the situation that makes them think with cloudy reason. Maybe they had a prior experience that makes them go into attack-mode. I'm sure there are a whole host of explanations, but it definitely makes caring for that patient so much more difficult. Irregardless though, I still try my darnedest to make them happy, even if I never to. I can't say it doesn't make me not want to trade them in for a a nice family though.