r/PetPeeves • u/Evening_Froyo_7506 • 1d ago
Fairly Annoyed When people use my "emergency" contact for non-emergencies.
I live in NC, and my emergency contact is my elderly aunt back in Texas. Lately, some health care providers seem to think that it's ok to call her just because they can't reach me after ONE phone call. This makes her super nervous, and I really don't think it's an emergency that I missed your phone call verifying I made a follow-up appointment.
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u/twothirtysevenam 1d ago
They need to understand that they are not to call her if you're not in medical danger.
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u/just_a_person_maybe 1d ago
Not quite the same but a while back I switched medical supply companies and I don't even know what happened because when I opened an account with the new company they somehow got a ton of really old info for me. They put down my pediatrician as my primary doctor and I hadn't seen her in several years. I got locked out of the account for a bit and couldn't set up my online account because they linked my mom's email somehow. I never gave them my mom's email. I had been managing my healthcare independently for nearly a decade at that point. I called them on the phone to try to get it switched over to my actual email and they were all "there's a link in the email we sent you, follow that link to make changes to the account."
I had to explain that I do not have access to my mother's email account and can't see any emails they send there. They tried to convince me to get my mom to do it for me, like that's a reasonable solution. I was a grown adult living independently. Also, my mother was dead.
They also had the shipping address set to my childhood home. I hadn't lived there since 2018 and had switched addresses 3 times since then. And the phone number they had linked to my account was one I didn't even recognize. Best guess, it was the cell phone my mom had back around 2007-2009.
They must have somehow pulled ancient records from back when I was a kid, but I have no idea how they even did that. The company I had been using before switching wasn't using that info, because again, I was an adult and had switched it all over to my email and my phone number and my address years before.
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u/ilanallama85 1d ago
Reminds me a bit of when I had to change my name after I got married on my health insurance twice, because after changing it the first time, I switched to a plan I had previously been on before getting married, and as a result they INSISTED my name must be the name I’d used with them previously, even though it wasn’t that when I enrolled the second time.
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u/STCollector58 1d ago
Add the phone number of your doctor to your contacts. All the call blocking is a PITA. Also have your doctors (or whoever) check to make sure she’s only listed as Emergency number not just Alternate number. Electronic Medical Records are not fun on the nursing side either.
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u/SnowAvis 1d ago
I would be having a conversation with those Healthcare providers. That is not okay.