Poll results – Who do you think is the most useless member of your healthcare team?

By | 5 July, 2012
Shoot Up readers wait to vote in this month's poll

Shoot Up readers wait to vote in this month’s poll

Like the cyclical inevitability of a routine A1C test, the results of the monthly poll have come round again. Last month your soaraway Shoot Up questioned who was the most useless member of your healthcare team.

Only 15% of you voted for yourselves – the patient. I suspect if we had run this poll exclusively with health care professionals the results would be different, with a significantly higher proportion of votes for the patients. But there we have it, patients and doctors not seeing eye to eye. Who’da thunk it?

Speaking of doctors, General Practitioners topped the poll with 34% of the vote. You lot just don’t like generalists do you? And, as Barry Norman would say, why not? This top result was fairly closely followed by dieticians with 22% of the vote. The general consensus divined from earlier comments on the blog was that dieticians were generally regarded as lovely but mainly useless. I imagine the dieticians reading this over their nut roast and low fat crème fraiche dinners won’t know whether to laugh or cry. I would do the former, followed closely by the latter.

Down at the bottom of the poll, with remarkably few votes, were pharmacists and specialist nurses. I’m not sure why pharmacists got off so lightly. Maybe you were all just feeling generous. As always, specialist nurses seem to be a popular choice – probably because they’re about the most knowledgeable and empathetic of our healthcare team.

Finally, optometrists garnered no votes at all – the first time that’s happened in a Shoot Up poll. Maybe we are all secret masochists who enjoy the Drops of Doom™ or having that horrible air-puffy thing in our eyes done. Who knows? I certainly don’t.

Anyway, this month we ask “How often do you meet up with other diabetics?” Cast your votes now! (Points to the bottom of the front page or to the right hand side if you’re in any other bit of the site).

Those results in full:

Who do you think is the most useless member of your healthcare team?

  •     General Practitioner (34%)
  •     Dietician (22%)
  •     Hospital Consultant (17%)
  •     The Patient (15%)
  •     Pharmacist (7%)
  •     Specialist Nurse (5%)
  •     Optometrist (0%)

 

8 thoughts on “Poll results – Who do you think is the most useless member of your healthcare team?

  1. Aoife

    My dietician is fat, not the best advert for her services…!

    Reply
    1. Lola

      A fat dietitian can really empathise with patients. A bit like a diabetic endocrinologist.

      Reply
      1. Tim

        That’s true. I’ve also got a myopic optometrist – they tap their way into the examination room with their white stick

        Reply
  2. Lola

    I cannot believe that dietitians didn’t win. We are DEFINITELY useless, I am useless every day, and I have colleagues and patients who would vouch for my uselessness. Only today I saw a diabetic patient having a hypo and told her to have a nice glucose tablet and a biscuit and to stop whining about being sweaty and clammy – it’s a British summer, for goodness sake. If she hadn’t lost consciousness I’d have given her some more useless advice.

    Not really. In case you wondered.

    Reply
    1. Tim

      He he he! Silly diabetics losing consciousness all the time! What are they like? 😉

      Reply
  3. Scotty

    My wife is a pharmacist and her mother is a dietician. So they are obviously the best members of my healthcare team…

    Reply
    1. Alison

      I take it you posted this on advice from the most influential members of your healthcare team, otherwise they advised that you might be in for a rough few months 😉

      Reply

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *