The start of the story
CallMe
The Call Me because names matter concept emerged after an interaction where a young person was admitted to a hospital following an accident.
Dr McCabe tells the story
#CallMe came about after a clinical interaction, where I went to see a pediatric patient on a trauma list for surgery. After checking the child’s name and location on hospital systems, ward receptionist and nursing staff, a particularly cold interaction followed with the patient and mother.
It was a crushing moment to find out at a later pre-theatre briefing that the child was living life with a different gender and name to that of birth.
It was not an issue that our healthcare or hospital systems could cope with and was likely to be repeated throughout their stay and for any future healthcare interactions.
I considered the fact that the child was being addressed by their birth name and being obliged to wear a name band with their birth forename. I considered the fact that this information was hidden from view on page 9 of the nursing admission notes. I considered the fact that this could happen in healthcare of all places.
The default in healthcare is to be addressed by the recorded formal forename or perhaps the surname. It struck me that this is an assumption that can have devastating effects when wrong.
The solution of #CallMe was born that day.”
The size of the Issue
There are various criteria collected and used in healthcare to identify individuals – forename, middle name, surname, date of birth, NHS number, gender and ethnicity. But how that person or their loved ones see them is not by these criteria but rather how they address themselves when interacting with others.
Early #CallMe adopters in the Worcestershire Acute Hospitals NHS Trust have completed over 150,000 #CallMe’s, directly asking how people prefer to be addressed in healthcare. Of this number almost 30% expressed a preference for a different name to their formal forename. Over a three-month period with 7000 ambulance arrivals at the same Trust, 31.7% of these people chose or were identified by relatives, as people that chose to be addressed by a name that was not their formal forename.
Whilst there is little on the subject published, it is interesting that an Australian study (1) reported that a third of their patients preferred to be known as something other than their formal forename. This is similar to the numbers recorded in Worcestershire.
(1 Parsons SR et al. ‘Please don’t call me Mister’: patient preferences of how they are addressed and their knowledge of their treating medical team in an Australian hospital. BMJ Open 2016, Volume 6, Issue 1
