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, […]
Reflective Practice
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 […]
Two things to remember before you educate your next patient
Today brings a close to a series I started a few months back, called 5 steps to improve your patient education. I promised to take a closer look at each of those 5 steps. So far I’ve written about eliciting patient background knowledge; how you handle your medical knowledge; being clear about your goals for […]
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 […]
10 Ways to communicate a complex idea during patient education
If you’ve got to explain something to a patient, how do you do it? If you have important information or complex ideas to share, how do you get it all across? This is another in my series on patient education. I’ve talked about getting clear on what you’re teaching and how you’re assessing; on patient […]
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.’ […]