Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Mortgage advice – helping you to choose your anaesthetic

2003; Wiley; Volume: 58; Issue: 11 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1046/j.1365-2044.2003.03484.x

1365-2044

F. Martin,

Hospital Admissions and Outcomes

I have recently seen a mortgage adviser and, before the consultation began, was given a leaflet about the Mortgage Code [1]. The adviser explained to me that there are three possible levels of advice and that she would offer me levels one and three only. It occurred to me that I could usefully offer the same service to patients about to have an anaesthetic by substituting the word mortgage for anaesthetic throughout a large portion of the leaflet. ‘Level One: advice and a recommendation as to which mortgage is most suitable for you. When giving advice, we will take care to help you to select a mortgage to fit your needs by asking for relevant information about your circumstances and objectives. Our advice will also depend on your particular requirements and on the market conditions at the time.’‘Level Two: information on the different types of mortgage product we offer so that you can make an informed choice of which to take.’‘Level Three: information on a single mortgage product only if we only offer one mortgage product or if you have already made up your mind.’ Although I think leaflets are over-rated as we are overloaded with written information already, I found it interesting that the adviser was quite clear that she would not tell me about every mortgage available, but only the ones which she had chosen as being good products. She was effectively saying that she would use her knowledge of the current market and our circumstances to pick the best mortgage available. I feel that there is a trend towards offering Level Two advice when Level One might be more appropriate. The patient has to come to a decision over minutes or hours when it has taken us years to come to our own informed decisions. I have felt a guilty sense of relief when a patient has chosen the easier option for me as an anaesthetist – guilty because my conscience doubts the facts on which their decision was based, despite careful explanation. Paternalism in healthcare is out of place, but is it wrong to offer someone what you might like for yourself or your relatives given similar circumstances, and say so? Of course, we will always meet the Level Three patients who greet us enthusiastically with a download about Combined Spinal Epidurals as technique of choice for varicose veins, and we will also occasionally resort to our single mortgage product as we only offer one product at that time of night.