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, […]
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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 […]
Infographic: Quickly assess your patient communication
What do I need to know about communication to be better at it? I hear this question, in one form or another, when speaking with health care professionals. And there’s no wonder why. When you’re dealing with so much complexity, your words have got to be clear. Getting a grip on your patient communication is essential. […]
What is the emotional impact of your patient communication?
A physician was telling me about a total patient communication fail. He did not know it was a fail, until a resident jumped in and saved the day. He laughed, recounting the scene to me. He thought he was doing fine. He thought he was being clear. But when he heard the resident’s language, he […]