Editor’s note: October has been Health Literacy Month, so I’ve often thought of Christopher Trudeau, who has contributed a number of posts to this blog over the years. Trudeau is affiliated with both the law and medical schools at the University of Arkansas, Little Rock. He is also a member of the International Health Literacy Association’s […]
Picture this: you are speaking to a group of leaders in a health system. They aren’t on their smartphones answering emails; they are engaged, interested and listening to every word you say. How great would that feel? I know; I know. This is not reality. So the question becomes, how do you engage these decision-makers […]
Editor’s Note: This week, we revisit a post written by “e-Patient” Dave deBronkart, whose thoughts are always evolving. In an article published in July in the Beryl Institute’s Patient Experience Journal, deBronkart continued to develop ideas that he explored for Engaging Patients in April: the pace of progress toward engagement and the kind of change that […]
I’m one of more than 17 million Americans who now have access to the visit notes my doctors write after my appointments with them. Here’s what I want my doctors to know: I’m a good listener – really, I am – but when I read my visit notes, I realize that I miss a lot […]
“Patient-centered care” was a term coined in the 1980s as a professional response to increasingly vocal patients’ demands for genuine empowerment. Three decades later, patient-centeredness is still necessary, but powerful economic, technological and social forces are bringing about new relationships in healthcare that patient-centeredness fails to adequately encompass. In a recent issue of the BMJ, […]
Editor’s Note: This week, Engaging Patients revisits a post by Jan Oldenburg, editor of Participatory Healthcare: A Person-Centered Approach to Healthcare Transformation. Jan interviewed 27 patients and caregivers whose stories are featured in the book. In this post, she highlights themes that emerged from the interviews and reflects on the central role patient stories can play […]
The patient safety movement and efforts to honor patients’ preferences emphasize the importance of skillful communication on the part of physicians and other clinicians. Less attention has been paid to the effect of patients’ communication skills. In addition to catching errors, patients can use effective communication skills to improve their health and the medical services […]
The Patient Perspective I brought my 79-year-old dad to the emergency room because to me it looked like he’d had a stroke. He could not hold up his Carvel ice cream cup, and his mouth was drooling and sagging. After 11 hours of waiting in the ER and undergoing a CT scan, an attendant brought […]
I recently interviewed a great many patients and caregivers as a part of research for the book, Participatory Healthcare: A Person-Centered Approach to Healthcare Transformation, published in August by CRC press. Through the process of interviewing the 27 individuals whose stories are represented in the book, I grew to appreciate how important it is to […]
Emotional well-being is not easy to measure, especially when compared to an improvement in blood sugar or blood pressure. Yet, I’m struck by how often patients use the adjective calm when describing health situations, explaining why they like their provider’s demeanor or wishing there was respite in a crisis. Calm need not connote ignorance, avoidance […]