One medical educator wrote me in response to the podcast, “How a small change in what you say can improve your patient education.” She thanked me for giving a ‘name’ to the problem that is a deficit perspective. She pointed out the tension between approaching a patient focused on the problem, and approaching a patient […]
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Health communication has all the pitfalls of everyday communication
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 […]
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, […]
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 […]
A practical way to address unconscious bias in language
Over the course of last year, I spoke several times with an African American male physician. At one point, we were talking about his professional journey in medicine. He mentioned that he had learned to be more comfortable with, as he put it, “…being the only Black person in the room. Hearing ‘How did YOU […]
Do your assessments measure what matters?
It’s the time of year when we like to look back, and look forward. We set goals. We assess where we’ve been, where we are, where we’d like to be. But in health care, assessment and evaluation has a decidedly harder edge. One nurse manager in a physician practice told me, in passing, “I’m kind […]