The Schwartz Center is committed to supporting healthcare professionals with additional resources on caring for their patients, themselves and their teams during challenging times. Please find mental health and wellness resources here.
Perhaps the most impactful approach to caring is to first recognize and ask about clues that patients are struggling to take care of their health, and then to adapt care to their particular needs and circumstances. For over a decade, Dr. Weiner’s research team has explored this two-step process, which they term “contextualizing care.”
In the first phase of their research, they trained a team of actors as unannounced standardized patients who would see a physician and indicate that personal struggles were undermining their health care. In the second phase they invited real patients with complex chronic conditions to audio record their visits. Encounters were sorted according to whether the care plan was contextualized, and then patients were followed for up to nine months. When clinicians made the effort to contextualize care, patients had better healthcare outcomes and there was less overuse and misuse of medical services. Remarkably, contextualizing care didn’t lengthen the visit. Dr. Weiner extended the research to include nursing, pharmacists and front desk clerks. During this webinar, he describes evidence that shows that listening, asking purpose-driven questions and adapting care plans to meet patients’ needs really does matter.
During this webinar, Dr. Weiner helps participants to describe the essential role of patient context in planning appropriate care, define “contextualized care” and its antonym “contextual error” and outline the implications for healthcare outcomes and cost of attending to patient context during the medical encounter.
Goals-of-care conversations are filled with emotion. Clinicians can often feel at a road block when they encounter highly emotional conversations. Patients and families may not be able to process medical information or make decisions when they are overwhelmed by emotion. Our presence, support and empathy are powerful sources of strength and comfort. By responding to emotions, we build trust and can move to a place of decision making. During this session, Dr. Aragon will provide a framework for using empathy in a goals-of-care conversation. We will review how to respond to emotion and present examples of how empathic statements can move a goals-of-care conversation forward. Finally, we will discuss scenarios when empathic statements may not facilitate a conversation as expected.
During this webinar, Dr. Aragon reviews the role of empathy when discussing goals of care, explores the use of empathic statements to help facilitate transitions in care and discusses how to modulate our responses when empathic statements are not moving a conversation forward.
Providing care to patients whose cultures and languages are different from our own can be difficult. Patients come with different beliefs, values and styles of communication. Some patients distrust the health care system or health care providers – attitudes which they may assert strongly, or keep hidden. Language barriers add another layer of potential misunderstanding. This webinar presents an overview of cross-cultural issues in health care and the role of empathy and compassion in addressing them. We explore case studies and reflect on effective approaches to providing compassionate, person-centered care to patients of all cultural backgrounds.
During this webinar, Dr. Green allows us to reflect on the role of empathy in cross-cultural care and understand the types of cross-cultural issues that can be a challenge to empathic care. Finally, he describes how we can improve health care providers’ communication and trust-building skills in diverse populations.
Empathy has the potential to be a catalyst for delivering truly individualized quality patient care, generating feelings of meaning in work for providers and for instigating sympathetic distress leading to stress and burnout. This talk navigates through the contemporary research to help us understand the phenomenon of the empathic connection from the fields of psychology (humanistic, social, health and contemplative), neuroscience and medical education in order to consider how, where and when to intervene to support our providers.
During this webinar, Eve helps us to develop a scientific understanding of emotion and burnout and learn about mapping an emotion episode. She also describes emotion regulation strategies and investigates personal motivation and meaning in work.
Patients continually indicate that their ideal clinician is one who listens. At the same time, the complaint that “doctors do not listen” is ubiquitous. This webinar explores this apparent paradox by addressing what listening actually is in clinical settings, its importance and impact and whether listening can be taught and learned.
During this webinar, Dr. Fuks teaches us what listening is in clinical settings and its function in clinical interactions, as well as why listening is the foundation of the clinical method. He also explains the different types of “deafness” found among caregivers and their causes. Finally, he instructs us how to teach clinical listening skills.
How a clinician behaves through nonverbal signals and style has an impact on patients and is considered an important component of patient-centeredness. Similarly, the clinician’s skills in accurately perceiving the patient (for example, the patient’s emotions, health experiences, needs, expectations or personality) are important for diagnosis, decision making and creating a wholesome relationship. Nonverbal skills can be improved through practice, insight and training interventions.
During this webinar, Judith discusses the importance of nonverbal communication in clinical and personal interactions, and reviews the supporting research evidence from social psychology and medicine. Tips from this webinar can be used for improving interpersonal perception skills in clinical situations.
Life is constantly changing. And life in health care is changing at an unprecedented pace. Sharon Salzberg, meditation teacher and renowned author, teaches us that in the midst of such change, there is not only uncertainty but also endless possibility and movement. To the question, “Can compassion be learned?” she responds with a resounding, “Yes!” Sometimes, all it takes is truly paying attention to the people around us. By paying attention to our experiences with sensitivity, we open our minds and our hearts, and understand how our actions affect others.
During this webinar, Sharon teaches us balanced ways of paying attention as a gateway to compassion. She explains the distinctions between empathy and compassion and why compassion for self and others is important in preventing burnout. Finally, she invites participants to experience a brief, secular compassion meditation as a method of transforming our worldview into one that acknowledges our fundamental connectedness.
Want to learn more about how to care for your patients and their families while taking care of yourself? View Dr. Beth Lown’s webinar, the first in our monthly webinar series on the concepts and skills you need to thrive in today’s health care environment.
Dr. Lown will introduce a framework of essential skills that put compassion and collaboration into practice and help you relate to patients, families and your coworkers more effectively. She’ll discuss some of the exciting new research on compassion, which demonstrates that we can learn to improve these essential skills, and she’ll talk about how compassion can help prevent burnout.
It would be beneficial to watch this webinar for context before watching the others in this series. Each monthly webinar will highlight one of the skills introduced in this session.
Family meetings are a routine part of care for seriously ill patients and their families. Effective conduct of these meetings has been associated with improved patient care and improved family outcomes. In this webinar, Dr. Curtis shares tips for both running and teaching positive family meetings, improving interdisciplinary communication, facilitating shared decision making around end-of-life care and how to use family meetings as a quality measure.