The hospital is nobody’s idea of the best place to spend a holiday. But as much as everyone would prefer to be home celebrating, there are patients needing care every day of the year. By expressing caring in ways that can be felt, you can ease a patient’s holiday hospitalization. Share a meaningful moment with family members who have had their holiday disrupted by an illness or accident. Empathize with coworkers who are also missing their family and friends. In this way, holidays in the hospital can be seen as opportunities for connecting and offering compassion to people when they need it most.
I recently got this email from a colleague on our Language of Caring team:
Wendy,
I wanted to let you know that working for Language of Caring has helped me as a patient. I have Crohn’s, which can be set off by stress. Recently, while organizing a family vacation, I started feeling a bit off. I’d read LOC material about patient engagement. So, rather than just hoping for the best (as I would have done previously), I made an appointment with my doctor. We discussed diet and stress-relief techniques, and he gave me a prescription to take with me. Instead of being sick on my vacation in Italy, I was able to enjoy it—including the pasta and gelato! Thanks!
Personal stories like the one above show that patients who take an active role in their healthcare have more positive outcomes.
Humility. A word that seems to have gone out of fashion; too often seen as a sign of weakness or lack of confidence. But is humility an archaic value? Or is it a valuable trait that has been disregarded by a culture in which it’s “all about me”?
Humility means having a modest opinion of one’s importance or work. It means not thinking of oneself as superior to others. While in today’s world, people generally don’t like letting others define their value and contributions, I have to wonder–if I am truly making a difference in the lives of people around me, should I need to tell others how valuable I am?
I was recently speaking to a roomful of physicians about communication skills that promote patient engagement. Not five minutes after I began, one physician exclaimed, “I hope you’re going to talk about how impossible it is to engage patients when you have to use the EHR!” A groundswell of his colleagues responded, “Yes, yes, yes!”
There is no question that dealing with a tech device like the Electronic Health Records while talking with a patient is challenging. But the EHR doesn’t have to interfere with patient-physician conversations, nor does it need to impede patient engagement or negatively affect the patient experience.
