Medicine puts physicians in a unique position of having knowledge that greatly impacts their patients lives, while the patient may have a more limited view or understanding. While the medical provider will often believe that he or she has the best treatment and plans for the patient, I believe it is always important to keep the patient’s perspective of their illness or condition in mind. CEO 1.1 states “Approach the care of patients as a cooperative endeavor; integrating patients’ concerns and ensuring health care needs are addressed.”, and I believe that this is one of the most important facets of being a doctor. While we may be working on treating a wound infection, the patient may be more concerned about his pain levels. While the medical team might be focusing on treating sepsis and balancing a patient’s electrolytes, they may be more concerned about getting a good night’s rest and not having blood drawn and vitals taken every 4-6 hours.
Starting third year rotations, I was often much more interested in thinking through the medical side of my patient’s ailments. After all, I wanted to apply all the knowledge I had spent the last year or so consolidating. However, quite early on it became clear to me how much a patient’s perspective of illness actually matters. Being empathetic and making an effort at addressing a patient’s concerns will in turn make them more trusting in the treatments they are being offered, and will also lead them to trust their medical team more as well. Ever since I matriculated into OSUCOM, my mother has always told me to be “a doctor who cares and listens to the patient” and not “one of the doctors who assumes he knows whats wrong without needing to even talk to the patient”.
One time where I was able to apply this advice was during my child neurology rotation. We had one girl on the floor who had been getting treated for new onset epilepsy, when one day she stopped taking her medications. When she would be approached to take her anti-epileptics, she would state that if she were medicated, she would try and kill herself. It was a bizarre turn of events and we wondered what could have possibly caused this child to start refusing her meds all of a sudden. I decided to spend some time talking with the child in the afternoons after rounds to try and get to the bottom of her medication refusal. In the end, it turned out that she was refusing meds because she thought that it would force her mother to come to visit her in the hospital. We worked with social work to attempt to arrange a meeting between the girl and her mother, and were also able to convince her to start taking her meds. I found it important to approach such patients in an empathetic and compassionate manner, and when we were able to glean her perspective, we were able to solve the roadblocks to her care and have her appropriately treated. By the end of her hospitalization, she even wrote our team a thank you note:
Thank you letter from patient on Pediatric Neurology at NCH (patient name blurred)
We also have a responsibility to make sure we give each patient the best possible care they can receive. In OBGYN clinic at Mt Carmel West, we had constant struggles with providing the best possible patient care to the population, whether the struggles were due to language barriers, poor follow up, or due to lack of medical knowledge by the patients. Due to the high amount of Somali and Spanish speaking patients, we often found that it was often difficult to get interpreters with the high patient loads who required them. The situation can easily lead to shoddy care by attempting to communicate with the patient in broken english, so I took it upon myself to make sure I waited as long as needed to ensure every patient I saw was with a qualified interpreter. I would offer to wait on the phone line for the interpreter in patient rooms while the residents would see english speaking patients to keep the work flow efficient:
Did a good job improving presentations after receiving feedback. Willing to help in clinic. In particular, willing to wait a long time for an interpreter to interview a patient in clinic. -OB/GYN evaluation
One specific goal I have for myself for my intern year is to make sure I spend time with my patients to ensure I am taking care of their concerns. I hope to always maintain an empathetic manner with any and all patients I see in the future, and would like to see my bedside manner improve over the coming years as well. I know if I was a patient, I would prefer to have a good physician who spent time addressing my concerns over a great physician who brushed my concerns off, and ideally I will be a great physician who takes his patient’s concerns and perspectives into account throughout my career.
CEO 1.1 Approach the care of patients as a cooperative endeavor; integrating patients’ concerns and ensuring health care needs are addressed.