Blog 23: Exit Interview Prep

Please be advised. The senior team will not conduct any exit interview in which the student has not turned in a passing notebook count and completed this blog. In addition, you are expected to dress as you would for a job interview.

Content:


(1) What is your essential question, and what are your answers? What is your best answer and why?

My EQ is: 

How can an optometrist best reduce patient non-compliance in their field? 

My answers are:

1.  Educating a patient in the risks of neglecting their eye care can reduce patient non-compliance.
2. Improving communication, not just between the doctor and patient, but also the doctor and his employees can improve the rate of patient compliance. 
3. Recreating the way the integrated eye care system works and functions can reduce patient non-compliance. 

My best answer would have to be communication.

(2) What process did you take to arrive at this answer?

My year of constantly having to defend my research as best as I could allowed me to fully realize to the extent of how important communication was in playing the role of reducing patient non-compliance. H.P Lovecraft once stated that, "The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown." This is true according to the results of my research. Doctors sometimes fear giving patients bad news, patients fear trusting a doctor. Though education  plays a big role in this as well, it is vital to first allow a patient to get comfortable with you as the optometrist. You can't just poke and prod at their eyes without asking how their day went or having a normal conversation with them. 

(3) What problems did you face? How did you resolve them?

I faced many problems such as, how was I to apply this answer specifically to my field of study.? Well I resolved this by asking more questions, studying more people, and by actually exploring other fields along side mine. What made my field special? Well, we work with eyes. Patients fear surgery all the time, especially if there is a chance of losing their eyesight not only to the surgery if a mistake is made, but as well as coming clean about any problems they have with their eyes. To a patient, especially in eye care, ignorance is absolutely bliss. 

(4) What are the two most significant sources you used to answer your essential question and why?

Be prepared with evidence and specific examples to support any response. It is also significant to cite sources as you explain.

The two most significant sources I used were medical journals from ResearchGate.net which came in very useful. One such medical journal being written by an optometrist named Mark Swanson. He discussed what the role of a primary care optometrist was in the lives of their patients, especially with a disease like macular degeneration of the eye caused by age. Including this one, they had many medical journals for me to study most written by other optometrists not only all over the country, but the world as well. The second source I found helpful were a few Ted Talks about fear and what constituted fear itself in the minds of the human being. It was important for me to understand how it fear connected to patient non-compliance.  A Ted-Talk given by Karen Thompson, discussed what "fear can teach us." She gave examples through stories of sailors trying to survive the brutal storms on the sea. Thompson explained how we prefer to take the road more traveled in most survival situations and it doesn't always go as planned. How does this apply to eye care? Patients may not always choose to come to an optometrist when they feel something minor is off with their sight, they most likely blow it off and leave it alone. This can be especially dangerous if it is something as macular degeneration. If you don't catch a disease in its early stages, you risk losing your eyesight.