YES, but HOW???
We’ve talked about a lot of essential topics over the past few days. From patient-centered care and clear communication to transparency and human error/high reliability approaches, these are all themes around which we can all agree. After all, we were selected for this conference because we were already doing things along these dimensions and thinking along these lines.
In scanning my notes for a worthy topic for my blog posts, I found “HOW??” written over 41 times. So far, we’ve discussed many of these concepts and approaches in theory and have discussed designing with the end in mind. But we haven’t really pushed too much until today on specific, practical strategies that we, in our current positions, can push forward. Tim did an excellent job of highlighting those today: developing practice scenarios on how to share bad news, identifying issues and reporting them, and encouraging feedback to reports to fight… Continue reading
Hope and Honesty
KPW shared an incredible story about her husband having a hernia surgery. She was in the waiting room, and even as an experienced health professional, she was concerned that the procedure was going over time. She was not informed of what was happening. Her only comfort was knowing that if something serious was happening, she would see people rushing down the hallway.
Especially in her case as a health professional, she has the health literacy, willingness, capacity, and right to be fully informed. This begs the question, though – is there an excuse as to why she was not kept in the loop? What might it be?
In a situation when a patient is told that something wrong may have happened, panic and fear are common immediate reactions. Hope is on the line, and holding out hope is often an unconscious rationale for delaying or withholding true transparency.… Continue reading
Interchangeable Parts or Empowered Actors?
During the debrief following the video on our first day, we discussed the importance of everyone stepping up. We identified this work in medicine as a “team sport,” where all members must work together, communicating clearly, and having the power to take ownership of the tasks ahead. This is crucial in the provision of effective patient care, and it is unfortunate that these often-considered “soft skills” are minimized or absent from medical education and practice.
We also highlighted industries such as military and aviation, where teams also taking on high-risk yet different scenarios must work together and do so effectively. They minimize risk, keep clients safe, and experience nearly no adverse effects. In these industries, members of teams are conceptualized as interchangeable parts – cogs in the machine/part of the assembly line – yet also intelligent actors with capacity and power to step up.
Our conversations hinted at this idea… Continue reading