Reflecting on today’s sessions, the idea of empathy and compassion as an integral component of effective communication and patient safety has me thinking about the current culture of healthcare. There is no doubt that empathy and compassion are of the utmost importance in healthcare and that physicians and nurses as individuals who enter this field value these attributes as such and aim to embody them. Yet, how is that so often we as healthcare providers seem to forget to put these concepts into action in our daily interactions with patients?

This is not to say that we intentionally neglect patients’ feelings and concerns. I  believe that most truly care for their patients and intend to be empathetic and compassionate, but going through my third year of medical school has changed my perspective on if we’re succeeding in this mission.

Before starting our third year, our faculty discussed with… Continue reading →

My week at Marseille is off to a great start. I can’t imagine a more beautiful place to escape the distractions of our daily lives to focus our attention on patient safety and quality improvement. There are so many interesting and impressive individuals here, both students and faculty, from whom I’m excited to learn.

Today, we watched a film about the story of Lewis Blackman. Often times, when people hear about tragedies like his, they assume that these events are uncommon and would likely not happen in their own hospitals, when in reality the opposite is true. Lewis’s case reminded me of that as it brought me back to a patient I had been following on my pediatric surgery rotation. She was a 3-year old girl, who had had an appendectomy for perforated appendicitis. After the surgery, her father expressed concerns daily that she was not improving – her abdominal… Continue reading →