health passports

as I’ve said the patients keep their own health passport that they buy from the hospital or clinic and bring each time they come…kind of their medical history…of course when they are full, they buy another one, and sometimes they lose the first one…so you get a completely new book with no idea what the problem is…and asking can help but can also be confusing with the answers, especially when they don’t know the names of their medications that they’ve been taking—not that there are a whole lot of choices on what can be given but there are some and then there is the dosage. Just knowing that you take one pill in the morning and two at night is sometimes helpful but then some meds are stronger or the pills come in different sizes…so this is often one of the puzzles to figure out and why at least for the epilepsy patients it is helpful to have the record I’ve been helping to keep of meds prescribed (though we don’t know if they really take every day or not)
then there is the occasion when the translator calls a name in the hall and a patient comes in…and the doctor starts the examination based on the health passport in front of him only to find after 5 or 6 questions that this is a different person who just happened to answer to that name. last week one of the epilepsy patients came in and at their last visit Dr. Morton had asked if the girl went to school. She didn’t but there was no real reason why not as her epilepsy is relatively well controlled. So he offered a deal. Continued free medication for the epilepsy if she enrolls in school. So she came and brought a letter from the school saying that she was enrolled! Very good. And only then do we get told that the health passport that she had been using for the last 6months (as long as we’d had her in the program) was not hers but her cousins. Her cousin has no epilepsy but the health passport is full of notes on epilepsy…easily fixed as I had a new passport I could give her but still…all to save MK50 (about $.23).