WIHI: A Legible Prescription for Health Care

Date: February 10, 2011

Featuring:

• Pauline Chen, MD, Columnist, The New York Times;  Author, Final Exam: A Surgeon’s Reflections on Mortality

Every now and again, a physician begins writing a regular column for a publication and you find yourself hooked before you know it. Part of it has to do with our being offered a way to better understand “how doctors think” and what they think about.

In the case of Pauline Chen, what stands out is her frank honesty about what works and what isn’t working in medicine, not only affecting patients, but the ways physicians interact with one another, and with other practitioners. Many of Dr. Chen’s columns spring from her day-to-day experiences — from confronting assumptions about patients that physicians hold onto to confronting one’s own loss of confidence after making a mistake.

Here’s an excerpt from her May 2010 New York Times column, "When Patients Share Their Stories, Health May Improve":
"Devastated, I withdrew my needle and quickly took steps to confirm, then care for, his punctured lung. But a few days later in the ICU when one of the heart surgeons asked me to place a central line in another patient, I couldn’t help but hesitate. He repeated himself and then I confessed. I had lost my nerve with this once seemingly straightforward procedure."

WIHI host Madge Kaplan and Pauline Chen discuss a whole host of topics, starting with language and the ways in which certain words and formal ways of describing a patient’s condition create distance rather than any sort of  bond. Dr. Chen also wonders about the human barriers inadvertently created between doctor and patient when the best infection prevention precautions are in place. And is there a danger of giving too much weight to what patients score or say in satisfaction surveys?