Reflections: Starting out on a Journey
Yesterday, we came full circle with our Marseille Experience with a case review of Lewis Blackman. It made me reflect on how our thinking has changed from immediately blaming one individual, to identifying problems and suggesting solutions. It is within our nature to have a visceral reaction to these emotional outcomes, but as Kamron emphasized, the importance of Heart, Head, Heart, I am starting to see just how brilliant that idea is. It is important to feel in medicine, it is important to maintain our emotions while providing care, but to allow ourselves space to grieve, to feel happiness, to feel anger, to feel motivated, to feel human. I think this entire Marseille Experience has been an entire exercise in just that, experiencing the pain of losing a patient to preventable harms, to feeling the inspiration to make change, to feeling anger towards a broken system, to feeling what it… Continue reading
Listening to your fellow human
During today’s Shared Decision Making exercise, the importance of how a provider/caregiver first opens the conversation sets the stage for the rest of the visit. The first “Clinician” to go began by speaking about the disease state and laying out options and very much talked for a solid 2 minutes before opening up the conversation to the patient. In the subsequent scenarios, our group felt that by asking the patient as soon as possible how they felt about their situation and what their preferences were regarding their concerns and treatment allowed for optimal flow in the “visit.” Additionally, when thinking back to how the Neurosurgeon in the Michael Skolnik documentary first began the conversation with the Skolniks, he began by saying, “I’ve been having the worst year.” When a patient and a caregiver converse, it is not about the caregiver. It is about the patient. When delivering bad news,… Continue reading
The power of unity
In today’s session, we discussed a number of topics ranging from dealing with communication problems to establishing the importance of placing patient safety as a core value, and not simply a priority as John Nance stated. What struck me most is that although we emphasize the strength in the power of one, there lies the opportunity to synergize our collective powers of one to become a new power of a united front. When examining the aviation industry and the reasons why it successfully turned its practices around to establish validated checklists and ensure customer safety for thousands of flights every day across the globe, one can find at its core the agreement between the leadership down through the staff that safety is at the forefront of all future decisions. Changes had to be made and over time, the leadership agreed, united and came together to tackle a monstrous task. Unfortunately… Continue reading
Clarification? Could you repeat that?
So often we are confronted with the question of whether to over or under communicate. Medical professionals are scrutinized for rushed care and poor lapses in judgment in deciding how to prioritize one patient’s matters over the others. In Day 1 of the 2016 Marseille Experience, there was clearly the spirit of a willingness to ask more questions and clarify when instructions or statements were unclear. Unfortunately, this is not necessarily as easily translatable into the clinical setting of our current medical reality. It is a shame that throughout our education before college, teachers, mentors, coaches, and parents would teach us to ask questions and to use our imaginations in the most explorative ways possible. But as we age, we let the experience, medical hierarchies and societal pressures prevent us from doing something so natural to us, asking a question and simply speaking up. From when do we let the… Continue reading