Wouldn’t it be nice if we could magically leave our awkwardness, doubt, or frustration at the door when we have to communicate in a professional capacity? In the summer of 2016, I was in the audience when Marcella Nunez-Smith, of Yale’s School of Medicine, gave a keynote address to a conference of health communication researchers. In […]
Health Communication
“I don’t want to unintentionally offend people”
I was coaching a physician on communication, and at one point our conversation took an interesting turn. We had been talking about interprofessional communication, when the physician told me she was worried about offending people unintentionally. At first, I thought she was talking about her colleagues. But she also gave some examples of interactions with […]
4 Questions to ask about mentoring in the health professions
About a year and a half ago, I began a series of conversations with an MD in Academic Medicine, who was interested in restarting the mentoring program at her medical center. She knew it would be a complex and significant undertaking. One ‘problem’ is the massive body of research on mentoring in the professions. Also, […]
12 Reflective practice prompts for health professionals
[This post available as a podcast episode here.] I have heard “reflective practice” mentioned a few times, in the years I have been talking with physicians, medical educators, and public health professionals. Dr. Tasha Wyatt, of the Educational Innovation Institute at the Medical College of Georgia, explained to me: “Physicians are trained–very much so–to gather […]
What does health literacy mean to you?
A few months ago, I decided to conduct an informal survey. I’d begun thinking about the relationships between health literacy research and health care workers’ everyday practice. Since I often get to talk with physicians one-on-one, I decided to ask the next few physicians I encountered a simple question: When you hear the phrase ‘health […]
Providers: your words may have more power than you realize
I was recently speaking with a woman who has Stage III ovarian cancer. We were talking about the language that gets used around cancer and other terminal diseases. She retold one conversation that stood out to her, because of her surgeon’s careful use of language: “He said, ‘Y’know it’s gonna get us in the end.’ […]